This winter we will be making changes to our website.
We opened the site in November 2017, very tentatively, very cautiously, with a post about the back-breaking job of planting 1,000 native daffodil bulbs. We didn’t know much about social media and we weren’t very sure how much we knew about the park.
We worked our way up to daily blogging about our wildlife and how to protect it, about the volunteers who looked after the park, the county’s politics and their plans for Southwick. Our intention was always local: local park goers, local schools, local wildlife, local information. In 2019, we persuaded Natural England and Wiltshire County to declare our park a Local Nature Reserve.
But there have been changes. Firstly, our website now attracts more than 50,000 annual views and, we fear, draws more visitors to the park than the park can actually manage. Secondly, our chief blogger has moved away from Trowbridge and is no longer in daily contact with the reserve. Therefore, on reflection, this seems an appropriate time to make changes.
Already, our website is used as reference: sometimes, if we Google one of the reserve’s resident creatures, we find our own previous posts about that creature high among Google’s findings. So, during this winter, we are going to re-organise the website to maximise its potential as a reference work.
Seven years into almost daily posts about the reserve’s inhabitants and their doings, things are beginning to look repetitive. There is a limit to that which can be written about, for instance, autumnal bird migration in 300 word episodes. We think that less frequent, but more detailed posts on subjects very specific to the reserve might be the answer.
We are going to experiment with longer posts, twice a week, on Wednesdays and at weekends. We want to follow the most recent science and to focus on the difficulties our wildlife faces as the climate changes and all those environmental chickens come home to roost. Our purposes, as always, are educational.
We apologise to our followers and our regular readers: have patience, please don’t abandon us while we settle into this new routine. Feedback, positive or negative, will be welcome and will help guide the development of the site, so keep in contact.
Go carefully in these strange and dangerous times.
All the images were taken in the park by the late and much missed DKG
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 
You all do a wonderful job to keep us all informed, I have learnt such a lot about the Reserve which is such a delight as the back of my house looks out over Lambrok meadows. I’m sure you’re making the right choice, like the seasons everything changes. Good luck with the new look website. Thank you 🙏
Thank you. We set out to help people understand local wildlife and I am so glad to hear you feel that we, in some measure, have succeeded. X
I found some weird galls under a oak tree and looked them up and you popped up in Google with a interesting post and a picture of the thing I found. A knopper gall Good luck!
Here you go – https://southwickcountrypark.com/2021/08/24/25556/
As a former Trowbridge native, I regularly follow the English seasonal progression on your blog with keen and wistful interest.
Where I live now, in suburban Western Australia, the local wildlife is also changing, and our summer – for me – is a daily survival exercise in, sometimes, forty plus degree temperatures.
I lived back in Wiltshire – in Bretton actually – during the seventies, witnessing the decimation and disappearance of the majestic elm trees from Wiltshires hedgerows.
Now I experience Deja Vu in the
Perth metropolitan region as the valuable tree canopy is attacked by a similar fate to Dutch Elm Disease in the form of a tiny beetle – Polyphageous Shothole Borer – invading both broadleaf and native eucalypts with a fungus in the cambium layer causing exactly the same symptoms; destroying our living environment.
Thank you for your excellent blog. Keep it up and improve it as needed. My best regards to the residents of Southwick and Trowbridge,(I grew-up on Frome Road, barely a mile from Farmer Brunts’ meadows).
Howard Osborne
Wembley
Western Australia
Hello Howard, our analytics tell us that we have readers in Australia – how nice to meet one of them at last. Thank you for commenting; you are just in time to stop us all complaining about the British weather and to remind us that there are worse things than a week of rain.