Hitchin Wildlife

   Hitchin Cemetery October to December 2022 Having been inspected by an assessor earlier in the year, in October the Friends of Hitchin Cemetery were delighted to receive an award recognising their work for the community and the environment from the Council for the Protection of Rural England. This helps us spread the word that the cemetery is an important asset to the Hitchin area. (Apologies to Hilary who is missing from the Friends photo). The final months of the year are still busy one for the volunteers with lots of jobs to do, tending graves and borders and especially hedge trimming now that the bird nesting season is well and truly finished. This year the bushes are a little easier to cut as we now have our very own hedge trimmer paid for by the developers of the Bethel Court houses. We have more of the developers grant left over to spend on tools, bird boxes and bat boxes which we look forward to installing over the coming months.    Autumn interest in the c...

  Cemetery Engagement Ideas - Junior School A Victorian cemetery off St John’s Road, Hitchin. It is a location which is safely away from traffic and provides a mixture of both historical and wildlife interest. There is the possibility to make use of the leaders of the cemetery tours (Veronica Gardner & Phil Barron) to provide extra information. Where   Hitchin Cemetery St John’s Road   What ·        5.64 hectares ·        Owned by NHDC ·        Managed jointly by NHDC & Countryside Management Service volunteers ·        Three separate sections based on the age of the burials ·        Oldest, mostly Victorian part most interesting. ·        Variety of graves: indicate relative wealth & religion · ...

 Hitchin Cemetery August & September 2022 The most significant event during August & September was the presentation of a long service award (garden centre voucher) to Betty for her work for over twenty years as a volunteer for the Countryside Management Service. Betty is the hardest working volunteer at the cemetery, keeping going for long hours in all weathers: note the muddy knees!  Betty has been used to hard  work having been a nurse all her working life. I won't embarrass her by disclosing her age, but she mentioned that she was one of those people who camped out all night to see the coronation in 1953 (a bit of rain never put her off then and it doesn't now), at the time she was working as trainee nurse at Great Ormond Street and it was just luck that her days off coincided with the coronation.    Compared to the above event, the cemetery wildlife was on the quiet side during August and September as the summer heatwave meant much of the grass had t...

  HITCHIN NATURE NETWORK – MOTH BREAKFAST 2022 In June Hitchin Nature Network held a Moth Breakfast and I wrote a related article ready for Inside Hitchin magazine as part of its Hidden Hitchin series of articles, very unfortunately this lovely little magazine has ceased publication and the article has never seen the light of day, so I thought I'd post this instead.  The theme of the piece was hidden creatures : those flying things which visit Hitchin’s gardens and wild spaces under the cloak of darkness: moths! We at Hitchin Nature Network understand that not everyone is the greatest fan of moths, but we are here to try and point out that they are really interesting, a marvellous part of our local wildlife and can look really cool! The breakfast was held at Mel & Dom's garden and Dom, who just happened to have a Willow Beauty land on his glasses, was obviously very happy to be a moth landing site.  The Willow Beauty is quite a large moth and many of the larger mo...