This is very exciting! We are currently developing a wildlife observation project in the woodland around the Centre. We got the idea from something we saw in The Lost Gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall near The Eden Project.
We have been having a fundraising campaign and we are almost ready to install the basic system. So far we have placed lots of new bird boxes in the woodland. The next stage is to lay cables to the boxes and put cameras in and around them with a monitor back in the Centre. Then our visitors will be able to watch birds hopping in and out of boxes and hopefully we will be able to see chicks hatching. We hope to have the basic infrastructure in place by the end of April. Later we plan to get enough funding to link the cameras to our website so that groups can carry on being involved with the project after they return home.
We are hoping to attract owls and birds of prey as well as the usual woodland birds. We built a large feeding station behind Castree House and it is attracting lots of birds to it already. We think its very exciting and we expect that all our visitors, young and old, will get a great deal of pleasure from this, as well as finding it a stimulating educational experience.