The Royal Society of Biology is a single unified voice for biology: advising Government and influencing policy; advancing education and professional development; supporting their members, and engaging and encouraging public interest in the life sciences. The Royal Society of Biology (RSB) London branch brings together teachers, researchers and industry members from various biology speciality areas to develop a branch that is dedicated to promoting biology in London.
In collaboration with GiGL, the RSB London Branch have created an open to all, friendly competition for people to record the wildlife they observe on their balconies and town houses in the Greater London area.
Following the success of Spring Watch on the BBC, which showed how the public can engage further with the wildlife around them, the RSB London Branch “Balcony Watch” seeks to engage both RSB members and non-members alike in a friendly competition to discover the wildlife on their doorstep. “Balcony Watch” applies to all those small private spaces from balconies and terraces to gardens within the Greater London area. The event will be run in collaboration with GiGL who will collect the data and add it to their ever-growing database. To read more about GiGL’s species data go to https://www.gigl.org.uk/species-data/.
The event will run over the bank holiday weekend of Saturday 30th April to Monday 2nd May 2022.
How to take part
If you would like to take part, please go to https://www.gigl.org.uk/recording-spreadsheet/ and select the “alternative spreadsheet with fewer fields” to download. Please note only one spreadsheet per household will be counted. You only need to include your name and address (location where recording) once on the spreadsheet.
Each species sighting should be recorded on its own line on the spreadsheet, including any abundance information. For the purposes of this event, abundance is the maximum number of individuals seen together at any 1 time, not the total spotted over the 3 days. To ensure that these records can be part of GiGL’s high quality data, each species should only be recorded once over the 2 day event, although the abundance can be updated if a larger group than was originally recorded is subsequently spotted. For example, if 2 ring-necked parakeets are spotted at 9am, then that should be entered on the sheet. If a group of 10 is spotted later that day, then the abundance can be updated to 10, and this becomes the new maximum number seen at any one time.
If you do not know the identity of the species you have seen, please make a best guess and include a photo of the species with your email and make a note of the photo name in the ‘comments’ section of the spreadsheet. This will also help the experts at GiGL confirm your sightings.
Please submit your spreadsheet and any photos before 11.59 pm on Monday 2nd May 2022, as an email attachment to: london@rsb.org.uk. Please note that spreadsheets submitted before or after the weekend of the event will not be eligible for the competition.
Prize Categories
As this is a friendly competition, we would like to encourage everyone to get involved and will award those who record an impressive number of species, as well as those who spot an endangered or exotic species. The categories are:
- Total number of species recorded.
- Total count of all species recorded.
- Most endangered native species recorded.
- Most exotic (non-native) species recorded.
The winner of each category will receive a Thompson & Morgan Flower Seed Box Bumper Pack that includes 40 different varieties of Aster, Cosmos, Sunflower, Poppy and Pansy, plus 1 pair of Garden Snips.
Outcome and Future Potential
encounter around an urban garden
(Akulatraxas CC BY 2.0)
We hope this event will bring together the passions of biologists and conservationists alike to inspire the next generation of wildlife conservationists to take an active role in nature ‘on their doorstep’. We encourage everyone to get involved regardless of their experience or knowledge of recording. By getting involved you will be contributing to an important database on biodiversity within the Greater London area. With the ever-greater changes in our natural world, leading to increasing threats to biodiversity and habitat loss, we feel that there is no better time to show people the wonders that exist in their own inner-city spaces and how they can feel empowered to make a positive difference “one balcony at a time.”