Good morning.Today I'd like to present the findingsof our Year 2 project on wildlife found in gardensthroughout our city.I'll start by saying somethingabout the background to the project,then talk a littlebit about our research techniques,and then indicatesome of our interim findings.
First of all,how did we choose our topic?Well,thereare four of us in the group and one day while wewere discussing a possible focus,two of the groupmentioned that they had seen yet more sparrow-hawks-one of Britain's most interesting birdsof prey - in their own city centre gardens and wondered why they were turning up in thesegardens in great numbers.We were all very engaged by the idea of why wild animals wouldchoose to inhabit a city garden.Why is it so popular with wildlife when the countryside itself isbecoming less so?
The first thing we did was to establish what proportion of the urban land is taken up byprivate gardens.We estimated that it was about one fifth,and this was endorsed by looking atlarge-scale usage maps in the town land survey office - 24% to be precise.Our own informaldiscussions with neighbours and friends led us to believe that many garden owners hadinteresting experiences to relate regarding wild animal sightings so we decided to surveygarden owners from different areas of the city.Just over 100 of them completed a survey onceevery two weeks for twelve months - ticking off species they had seen from a pro forma list -and adding the names of any rarer ones.Meanwhile,we were doing our own observations inselected gardens throughout the city.We deliberately chose smaller ones because they wereby far the most typical in the city.The whole point of the projuct was to look at the norm notthe exception.Alongside this primary research on urban gardens,we were studying a lot ofbooks about the decline of wild animals in the countryside and thinking of possible causes forthis.
So what did we find?Well,so much that I just won't have time to tell you about here.If you'reinterested in reading our more comprehensive findings,we've produced detailed graphicrepresentations on the college web-site and of course any of the group would be happy to talkto you about them.Just email us.
What we've decided to present today is information about just three species - because we feltthese gave a good indication of the processes at work in rural and urban settings as a whole.