From David Wild, East Lothian Council's Countryside Officer

I am just getting in touch with a few items that may be of interest.

Firstly, I'd like to share Nick Morgan's summary of butterflies recorded in East Lothian in 2024.

For those who don't know Nick, in his day job he is ELC's Countryside Access Officer, but fortunately for us he is also our resident butterfly guru and spends a lot of time as a volunteer pulling together data from the various monitoring projects and casual records around the county.

His report for 2024 is attached here as a PDF.

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Secondly:

Workshop on Hedgerows: Tuesday 18th February morning (estimated time 3-4 hours, starting at East Linton Community hall)

A great opportunity to learn about healthy hedgerows and assessing them, to upskill all our knowledge. The People's Trust for Endangered Species, which set up the Healthy Hedgerows assessment app, have really excitingly offered to do a workshop in East Lothian for interested parties. If you or anyone in your group / networks would be interested, please sign up here:

https://buytickets.at/eastlothianclimatehub1/1528615

This is a fantastic opportunity and will cover:

• A presentation on:

◦ specifics of benefits to wildlife from hedges

◦ the life cycle of a hedge

◦ benefits of hedges for farmers

◦ how to establish and maintain hedges effectively

◦ how to use the Healthy Hedgerow app and use it for surveying

• A short walk observing hedges and their health

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Also, in case it is of interest, please see the following details about a river monitoring project by Buglife:

Guardians of our Rivers
Guardians of our Rivers is a partnership project that will connect communities across Scotland with their local rivers and the invertebrates that call these places home.  Freshwater wildlife in the UK is under threat as the rivers, streams and other freshwater habitats they live in have been damaged and/or polluted.

https://www.buglife.org.uk/projects/guardians-of-our-rivers/

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Last but not least, please see the following details of an interesting new project being run by East Lothian Antiquarian & Field Naturalists' Society (ELA &FN):

A new field name recording project is being run by ELA & FN Society with the aim recording field names as they are now, assess their age and also record any earlier names used for the fields that can be identified from surviving records. To find out more about this project and to get involved please see:

https://eastlothianantiquarians.org.uk/2025/02/proposed-field-name-recording-project-for-east-lothian/

Anyway I hope the year has started off on the right foot for you all and we will look forward to seeing you out and about over the coming year.