A crowd of us recently spent Valentine's Day 'loving our local nature reserve'!
We carried out a litter pick in Canal Walk - a beautiful area of wet woodland on the shores of Lough Neagh at Toome.
We held the event to celebrate and raise awareness of World Wetlands Day, which is on 31 January. Unfortunately we couldn't go out on this day as it was the last day of the shooting season on Lough Neagh, and we felt that guns going off all the time might scare some people, myself included! So we opted for Valentine's Day instead.
We had a great turn out at the event, 17 people in all - and we managed to tidy up even the worse parts of the site. The area has suffered from quite a bit of dumping, with everything from beer cans and plastic bottles, to beds, sofas, pallets and even a kitchen sink!
Many hands made light work as we dragged soaking wet mattresses and plies and piles of rotten wood onto Henry's trailer to be taken to the local civic amentity site and filled countless bin bags with the litter we lifted.
We chose this site to work on because wet woodland is a priority habitat in Northern Ireland which is in decline, and we are working towards improving these areas. Wet woodland is a particularly important habitat with wildlife, especially insects such as snails and spiders, many of which are rare in Northern Ireland.
The weather held up well for us, and it just started to rain a bit as we were heading for home. The only near disaster was when we realised there might not be enough cups for everyone to get coffee, but it worked out fine in the end and everybody got a wee cuppa and a biscuit for their efforts!
by Vikki on 20 February 2009 at 01:57 PM
I was really very suprised to see the amount of rubbish dumped at this beautiful site, as Susan has mentioned even a kitchen sink was amongst the rubbish! It was great to see such a good turn out for this event and it goes to prove that working together can have really good results. Lets hope that the walkways and grass areas stay clean and tidy!