A wild weekend of nature in Bristol

The Festival of Nature Wild Weekend returns to Bristol this weekend with a huge line up of more than 100 organisations showcasing their work with wildlife.

Savita Custead, chief executive of the Bristol Natural History Consortium which organises the festival, says this weekend is “likely to be our best year yet”.

“Not only does this year’s event take on greater significance as it is Green Capital year, but we have such an incredible line-up including the famous birder Bill Oddie and Andy Day from CBeebies who will be doing more of his dinosaur raps.

Two major new environmental initiatives will also be launched this weekend – the Bristol Parkhive app and the opening of a new water fountain in Millennium Square.

Parkhive has been designed to showcase Bristol’s parks and green spaces and encourage people find and explore them within the city.

Troopers Hill is one of Bristol’s open spaces which can be discovered using the Parkhive app

Through the use of the app, people will be able to find out more about local walking routes, features, wildlife and much more in the outdoor spaces in their local areas. One of the key elements of the app is that it enables people to search for parks which match specific characteristic, for example a space with a play-area or nature reserve.

UWE’s Sam Thomson helped developed the app. He said: “Bristol is blessed with an abundance of beautiful green spaces, but often people are unaware of them or not using them to their full potential and this app aims to help change that.

“Only five years ago more than 60 of our green spaces were threatened with ‘disposal’, often due to what was described as a lack of use. By creating a database of all of our parks, making them really visible and showing them at their best through a photo gallery, we hope to encourage their use and protect them for future generations.”

The second new initiative to be launched at the festival is a new water fountain which is being installed on the Las Iguanas corner of Millennium Square by Bristol Water. The fountain will be in place for six months and aims to reduce our dependence on bottled water.

Bristol Water environment manager Patric Bulmer says the fountain is “part of our efforts to show that bottled isn’t always best”.

“In the UK we spend £1.5 million on bottled water every year and we send around 15 million plastic bottles to landfill every day. However tap water in the UK is of extremely high quality and undergoes a daily rigorous test, whilst bottled water only gets tested once a month at source.”

Highlights of the festival include:

• Try your hand at being a wildlife presenter in the BBC Natural History Unit marquee
• Festival Talks Tent, including the UK’s favourite birder Bill Oddie and One Show presenters George McGavin and Mike Dilger
• The Grow Wild Stage and CBeebies star Andy Day who will be performing more of his dinosaur raps in Millennium Square
• Hands-on exhibits by leading conservation groups including Bristol Zoo, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the RSPB and Avon Wildlife Trust
• Beautiful butterflies in the pop-up North Somerset Butterfly House
• The beautiful Festival Garden which has been landscaped by Earth Timber Stone
• Investigate cutting-edge research by UWE and Bristol University in the fields of nature and the environment
• Watch some stunning clips shot by Bristol’s world-leading wildlife film makers as part of the Bristol 2015 Wild Encounters Project

The Festival of Nature runs from June 13-14 2015 on and around the harbourside. For more information, visit www.bnhc.org.uk/festival-of-nature/go-wild-in-the-heart-of-the-city.

Photo credits: Shutterstock, Bob Coombes