We took part in the Hedgehog survey as we had seen some in our garden last summer. We were delighted to discover that one came most nights to hoover up dropped seeds from the bird feeder and then went on the same circuit to the next garden – leaving a distinct path in our ‘No Mow May’ lawn.

We will now have to find where it comes in and goes out, to make sure it has free access around the gardens. We also found that a fox was visiting too, to have a sniff around the feeder hoping to find some tasty treats. We had only seen this once before on an early morning visit. There were also our cats leaping around as well as mystery cats from the neighbourhood. Our day visitors seemed to be a fat wood pigeon looking for pickings as well as lots of pictures of our legs! This was great fun to take part in and we found out a lot about the nocturnal goings on, on our lawn.

In May 2021 we decided to participate in the Chester Zoo Hedgehog Watch to support the zoo and to spread awareness of hedgehogs in the Local Community.

I setup 3 or 4 camera’s in different places around the garden to capture the lifestyle of hedgehogs. The zoo camera was used to capture hedgehogs going into the feeding station.

We have a couple of feeding stations and hedgehog homes. We have a couple of rescue hedgehogs and some that come in from a far.

It was ideal being able to participate in this programme and we would highly recommend others to take part if they are interested!

The team of volunteers at Chester Zoo decided to take up a virtual mission in March 2021 to help save our zoo and help the incredible conservation projects here in the UK and around the world.

Our mission was to individually in our homes, gardens, on our daily commutes to work and daily exercise, walk/cycle/run/wheel and scoot our way from Chester Zoo to Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm where our Andean Bear Madidi now lives, this was a 142 mile mission…that we had conquered within the first week!

By the end of March we had all together completed 2223.19 miles (which is the same as walking every single path of the zoo well over 126 times!) and we raised over £2000!

Dad had two forms of cancer and a bone disease causing back and knee pain. We never complained about his health problems. In 2009 he celebrated my birthday with me by spending the day walking around the zoo when he must have been in a lot of pain.

I printed “Save Our Zoo” tshirts and sold them through Facebook. With the proceeds I adopted 2 animals (Ringtailed Lemur & Red Panda) on behalf of my company and our customers.

I am a keen hobby photographer and member of the zoo; I started training as a volunteer at the zoo just before lockdown and completed it via zoom during lockdown; I have raised over £450 for the zoo by selling prints of my photography and raffling off animal adoptions.

I hosted a quiz during the last lockdown to raise vital funds for the zoo, we raised £200

Zoe and Imogen Bowler, Josh Allen, lynda Smith and myself ( Fran Drake) organised a charity auction and put together a calendar featuring photos of your animals taken by many of your regular visitors, there were some lovely lots donated to the auction many with a Christmas theme and we sold just over 200 calendars, with some being posted to the United States, together we raised just over £5,000 with news of another lockdown we will soon be working on other fundraising ideas ,