We’ve lived in Basingstoke for more than 35 years, and being interested in all forms of wildlife, made the occasional visit to what was the Weyhill Zoo, and then the Hawk Conservancy from the early 70s onwards. In 1996, I went part-time at work, and started to come regularly as a member, just at the time the meadow was in its first flowering season. I’ve been a totally hooked member ever since.

Searching the hedgerows

I just wanted somewhere to unwind from a stressful job, and still enjoy that aspect of my visits, which I try to make as often as I can, work and weather permitting. However, it’s almost impossible to be a regular visitor and not get involved in giving a hand in various ways, and over the years I have done a remarkable number of odd jobs around the park. The nature of my work means I can’t commit to a regular day, so unlike a lot of the other “helping hands” I don’t have any particular duties.

From the very beginning, I got involved with the meadow. Bob Rodgers was systematically photographing the flowers, and producing the photos that used to hang in one of the hides – taken down a few years ago as they had sadly faded beyond recognition. I spent quite a lot of time helping with identification of the flowers.

I don’t work much with the birds, but have done the usual round of scrubbing, weeding and raking in aviaries – I particularly remember working in Cabbage and Parsnip’s aviary, which was a mildly unnerving experience as Parsnip, being a friendly sort of bird, tends to hang around helpfully rather like a dog. A bit unnerving to turn round to your bucket and find a vulture inches from your bottom. I’ve helped to look for flyaway birds (especially Danebury), manned the gate at the 12.00 demonstration, done the heron and raptor feed (with commentary), picked litter, brought out a baby black vulture to the patio, washed up and served in Duffy’s Coffee Shop, cut browse for the deer and removed a Ross’s Goose (under my arm) from the Valley of the Eagles arena.

Brigid looking at small details of a plant to confifm its identity in the book

Most of all though I have been involved, together with Monica Johnson, in keeping records of and helping to identify plants in the meadow and generally around the park. Monica and I work together on the “Meadow Muses” page, as we are both interested in wild plants and butterflies. She has the camera and knows much more than I do about invertebrates, while I make up for this with birds. Monica does many other things around the park and can be too busy to spend time in the meadow, so I am often the one who finds new interesting plants there such as the bladder campion and knapweed broomrape that appeared there last year. While usually Monica writes most of “Meadow Muses”, I have done the parts relating to birds and some on trees, and also on plant families.

We are also starting, under Campbell’s guidance, to do some systematic surveys of the meadow, to get some quantitative evidence about what is growing there at different times of the year. The aim in the long term is to have a baseline for managing the meadow for maximum biodiversity.

Reg's meadow in full summer glory - you can see why Brigid became hooked

A couple of years ago Ashley asked me to see if I could make a list of all the trees in the park, and that sparked a new interest in trees generally and conifers especially – a particularly steep learning curve as I found out how to tell different sorts of spruce apart, and how to differentiate between Lawson cypress and Leyland cypress. Did you know that most of the suburban hedges despised as leylandii are actually nothing of the sort? This new interest resulted in the page on “Christmas Trees” in the January edition of The Accipiter. It has been fascinating to see how many rare trees grow around the park. And I haven’t got to the bottom of all of them yet. I’m still working on it – after all, there’s no fun in natural history without mystery. And let’s not even mention grasses…

I’m never happier at the Trust than wandering around the meadow on a fine day, looking for something interesting, with the skylarks singing and a red kite drifting overhead, always alert to something that will contribute to our knowledge and understanding of that wonderful meadow and its value as a piece of habitat for wildlife.