This summer, Suffolk Wildlife Trust was invited back to Woodbridge parks by Woodbridge Town Council, who funded family sessions to explore actions people can take for wildlife in their local parks and gardens.

We ran five days of fun activities, with over 200 participants, throughout June, July and August. Action included building hedgehog homes, bird boxes, minibeast mansions, pollinator homes and bat boxes, which will all go up within and around Woodbridge, to help create wildlife corridors that link Woodbridge’s green spaces with one another. As well as building homes, families learnt about the creatures they were building the homes for and discovered how important insect life is for hedgehogs, birds and bats.

In particular, families discovered these simple actions that everyone can take in their gardens to help wildlife:

• Leaving out bowls of water or make a wildlife-friendly pond.
• Planting night scented flowers such as evening primrose, for night-time insects and bats.
• Leaving dead wood to rot or making a log and leaf pile in the corner of a garden to help insects.
• Cutting a little hole in fences for hedgehogs to squeeze through, which is really important for their survival.
• Never using chemicals such as weed killers or slug pellets as hedgehogs, birds and bats can be poisoned by them.

The families also learnt the power of telling a friend or neighbour about their actions. This is because we can create some fantastic wildlife corridors and hedgehog highways that give wildlife a chance to travel around safely from place to place. We hope to be doing more community sessions in the October half term and creating more stories for nature.

Find out more about attracting wildlife in your garden