Love your Burial Ground

Churches Count on Nature & Green Week Saturday 7th -Sunday 15th June.

St Peter’s and St Paul’s Church, Seal, is registered with God’s Acre and A Rocha, is holding an “event” during this special week, dedicated to stewardship for God’s unique creation, our Earth! We are on the map!

Every day of these 9 days, Eco Church members will be undertaking surveys of wildlife within our beautiful and ancient churchyard (our fourth year of doing so), submitting our recordings at the end of that time to NBN (National Biodiversity Network) for mapping.

A special evening, if anything like last year, will hopefully be Friday 13th June, 8- 9.30pm, when we’ll be hoping to see Swifts going to roost under the church roof flashings, Bats flying around the bat boxes we placed in the ancient Yew tree on the Eastside of our church (bat detector available) and the setting up of a Moth trap in the vicarage garden.

On Saturday morning (time TBC) the Moth trap’s owner, Tasha, will come to help us check the moths temporarily detained overnight, and we’ll have a go at IDing them over some breakfast on the lawn/in the church hall (weather dependent) before gently releasing them.
There will be some Froglife information (“Here be dragons!”), a churchyard trail from 8pm on Sunday, and a couple of creative activities available over a little breakfast on Saturday, to support our appreciation of, and hopefully to directly help, our churchyard wildlife.

Surveys of our God’s Acre will take place at different times on various days, when volunteers are free, and all are so welcome to join in at their own times, using the free iNaturalist app to ID, record and submit findings, or may record in hard copy on flipchart paper in the church porch, for Babs to add into the EcoChurch submission.

Details of how to use iNaturalist (free app for iPhone or Android) are posted in the church on the Eco Church display board, alongside some children’s ID and activity sheets, free to take and enjoy, please (& on the porch wall corkboard, too).

If you’d like to know when others are planning to be in the churchyard each day, please call Babs on 07973 478968. For a printout of what is happening please see here.

Thanks for joining in!!! St P and P’s, Seal, Eco Church