How St Matthews used iNaturalist to get their church on the map!
1st March 2023
We spoke to Sarah Folkes from St Matthew’s Church, Salford Priors about their experience of joining in with the week.
Hi Sarah, please tell us a little about yourself.
I’m the Family Link Worker for St Matthew’s and I’ve been here for 4 years now. I love the variety of things that I get to do! I run our weekday stay and play group, lead Collective Worship in our local schools, lead a monthly Muddy Church, help with Family Services, children’s crafts and have fun leading ‘Bake through the Bible’ once a month.
The events that you registered as part of Love your Burial Ground Week and the Churches Count on Nature initiative looked fun and ambitious – how did it go?
As part of the ‘Churches Count on Nature’ initiative, we have had visits from the Salford Beavers, Rainbows, Brownies as well as a whole KS1 trip from Salford Priors Academy. Including our own Muddy Church meet up, we have had over 90 children visit our Churchyard to spot trees, lichen, birds, insects and plants. We have really enjoyed seeing the enthusiasm from the children and their leaders/teachers/parents as they observe creation and learn new facts together.
Our events spanned 9 days, covering the whole week!
You recorded a lot of wildlife and thank you for submitting your records of this. There are various ways of submitting records to us – which method did you choose?
We uploaded our records to Caring for God’s Acre’s Beautiful Burial Ground Project on iNaturalist.
For the Beavers, school classes, Rainbows and Brownies, I pointed the leaders/teachers to the Caring for God’s Acre resources. The school chose ‘lichens and leaves‘ whilst the scouting and guiding groups chose ‘bug hunting’ and ‘leaves/tree spotting’.
On the Sunday (Muddy Church) I had asked and advertised for any attendees to have downloaded the iNaturalist app before coming to Church. I even sent out a crib sheet of how to use the app, step by step.
About 60% of adults had downloaded the app due to my directions online during the week whilst the others were quickly given our Church Wi-Fi code to download the app. I had also printed copies of my crib sheet of how to use it so that I wasn’t on technical support all of the session. Both children and adults found it easy to use after a couple of goes. My 8 year old was able to photograph and log independently and loved this. The suggestions of things were generally accurate although we did also have some reference books to look at to help identify our findings too.
Since June, I have continued to use the app for my own interest to log and ID unknown species.
We are so glad that this method worked well for you! Are you planning to submit records at other times of the year too?
A seasonal logging session would be interesting to do, yes. I’ve since spoken to someone at Coventry Diocese about my Muddy Church work, and she’s interested in hearing more about what we’ve been up to and they came to visit us this Autumn for a session. I have shared planning and ideas with this contact at the Diocese.
I’ve also shared our findings on the Church Facebook page.
Thank you Sarah for joining in with such enthusiasm and for sharing your successes with us!
St Matthew’s records
Churches Count on Nature is a joint initiative promoted by Caring for God’s Acre, the Church of England, the Church in Wales and Arocha UK. During Love your Burial Ground week in June, it brings local people together to discover the wildlife in their local church yard, recording the species they find, combining their results with others which will be collated on the Beautiful Burial Ground portal within the National Biodiversity Network (NBN), a nationwide database of wildlife in the UK.
