Wild London is on BBC1 on New Year’s Day! BBC1 at 18:30 – don’t forget!
Wow, I’m really looking forward to this!
Sir David Attenborough is in London. He’s lived in the city for 75 years, and it’s got an incredible variety of wildlife in it. And he is presenting a new programme, Wild London, which is a Passion Planet production and co-produced by the London Wildlife Trust.
Deer, pigeons, snakes, seagulls – Sir David shows the amazing wildlife across the city. Animals are adapting to survive. A pair of peregrines nest on the Houses of Parliament – their chicks try their first flight. Foxes living right in the heart of Tottenham try to get to grips with rivals and dangerous streets. And beavers have come back to Ealing, as the video below from the London Wildlife Trust shows!
And this programme sees Sir David find out how people across London are making sure some of our best loved species can still call London home. He joins in efforts to bring animals who’ve disappeared from the city, right back to it.
It’s a great reminder how cities aren’t just about being homes for people. They are homes for wildlife, too.
Please do visit the programme’s website – there are some great clips there, and the London Wildlife Trust have a free online Urban Wildlife Course – find out all about that here.
Ways to help London's wildlife
London Wildlife Trust say there are three things you can do to help nature in London:
Become a member, from £3.50 a month for an individual membership. Joint and Family Memberships are also available.
Help wildlife from home by making a space for them – there’s advice about how to do that here e.g. how to build a pond, how to attract butterflies and bumblebees to your garden, how to create a container garden for wildlife, how to build a hedgehog home etc. Just look at how Londoners are creating hedgehog highways across their gardens – a sort of motorway system for hedgehogs, if you like!
Find out more about the species living there! The London Wildlife Trust has lots of information about your neighbours (if you live in London) such as red fox, beaver, fallow deer, jays, coots, mallards, harvest mice (soooo sweet!) and the stunning peregrine falcon.
I don't live in London and want to help!
Now, if you’re going to be watching this on the television or iPlayer after the show is over, but you're miles from London (you can always help from afar. I'm a member of three Wildlife Trusts, and only live in the area of one of them), you could look for your local Wildlife Trust and have a scamper around their website. There are 46 Trusts throughout the UK, from Scotland to Alderney in the Channel Islands, Cornwall to Norfolk, and they have ways in which you and I can get involved and be a part of the journey to help wildlife. Find your local here!
The beautiful photo at the top of this blog is by Andy Willis.
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