Tara Isherwood

The 5am start may just be our earliest task start time ever for Windsor and Maidenhead. What a beautiful morning to do good deeds. GoodGymers Sheila, Tara, Amy, Amanda, Sara and Kelley were bright eyed when they met at Ray Mill Island in Maidenhead to support swimmers doing 5km, 2.8km or 1.4km open water river swims. After a quick safety briefing the team got straight to work.

Amanda and Sara did not flop on their flip-flop duties and strung together hundreds of pairs of clogs and sandals to meet their owners at the end of their races. Amy, Tara and Sheila took responsibility for labelling swimmers' keys to ensure no one arrived in a Ferrari but left in a Fiesta! Kelley was our keen photographer capturing all the adventures.

After the swimmers left the start line, the team turned to marshalling duties to greet and direct the swimmers doing the longer historic 5km route all the way from Cliveden. Then it was onto the final stage of signing posting people out of the water, hosing down feet and handing out medals, bacon sarnies and hot tea to the chilly but cheerful swimmers at the end of the race. Some of the team even caught a glimpse of Olympian Tom Dean who was amongst the swimmers. Overall it was a great event and the GoodGym team are ex-stream-ly keen to come back and help again next year!

Plantlife's No Mow May campaign encourages people to lock away the lawnmower throughout May. The aim is to let the wild flowers in your lawn bloom, to help our bees, butterflies, wildlife and us. 🌼 🐝 🦋

Lots of GoodGymers took part, reserving the weed-pulling for community centre flowerbeds and leaving their own lawns to bloom! 🌻

Sheila's daisies were joined by dandelions, speedwell and buttercups. She's decided to continue the experiment, and just mow around the edges, plus a path across the middle, but leave the remainder of the lawn to its own devices ... blooming marvelous! 🌼

Naomi found an abundance of forget-me-nots and speedwell, with the bees in particular enjoying the speedwell. 🐝

Tracey and Gwyn enjoyed not mowing their lawns, going out walking with the time they saved, and saw even more unmown lawns!  Their pictures include one for each of their lawns, one for a colourful unmown patch in Alvaston, and a couple from Penrhyn Castle where a lamb was clearly ignoring the sign, despite it being in Welsh! 🐑

Thank you to everyone who took part. 💐

Our friends at Wild Eton Wick are taking part in the National Bat Monitoring Program, so we took the opportunity to join them in what turned out to be a fascinating and exciting evening. Georgeta, Kanika and Sheila cycled to Eton Wick along the Jubilee River, and we all gathered just before dusk at St John's Church. We joined up with Claire, Tom and Andrew from Wild Eton Wick who led the survey and were our resident bat experts, as we were all novices. Claire gave us an introduction to the bats and how the survey would work. Kelley and Kanika took charge of the 2 bat detectors, one set at 45kHz to detect common pipistrelles, and the other set at 55kHz to detect soprano pipistrelles. The inaudible bat calls are picked up by an ultrasonic microphone and mixed with the output of a high frequency oscillator in the bat detector to produce a noise audible by us mere humans. Tom had a different instrument that scanned at all frequencies, and could report back on which species was present. The rest of us were looking for visual sightings of the bats, and any other mammals which might be around. We all spread out around the churchyard. As it got darker, both detectors started picking up bat activity, and everyone was very excited to see the bats flying around the trees and church. No one batted an eyelid to see such acro-bat-ics. Kelley even managed to video a bat flying overhead whilst the detector went bananas in the background. Noctule bats (the biggest British bat species) were also detected around the church. And all to the sounds of music floating across the fields from the Ride the Night event at Windsor racecourse. We eventually had to drag ourselves away - the cyclists made their way back to Maidenhead like bats out of hell to warm themselves up, whilst Sara had to contend with the Ride the Night cyclists on her way home. Thank you so much to Wild Eton Wick for inviting us along and enabling us to contribute to the survey, we all loved this task!

Three goodgymers headed to a small but highly important piece of grazing land today. The land owned by Eton College is designated as a SSSI, because of the presence of a rare and declining plant called the Pennyroyal. As a consequence, the management of scrub is highly important to enable the Pennyroyal to thrive. It grows in the halo of a damp divot in the ground in a unique habitat.

Our task is to support Nature Bureau to clear the scrub. The task involved working to load cuttings into wheelbarrows and relocate the eco piles into the lower field, south of the hedgerow/drainage ditch. We were supported by other local volunteers which was heaps of fun with encouragement from the resident wildlife.

It is a beautiful location we enjoyed pitch forking in and the weather made it a really memorable task.