How Species-Spotting Brought an English Village Together Around Its Wildlife
In Blagdon, North Somerset, residents have become citizen naturalists, tracking dung beetles, skylarks, adders and dormice across a regenerative farm. Coordinated by ecologist Patrick Hancock through a WhatsApp group and the iNaturalist app, the survey turned neighbours into "extra eyes and ears" for nature.
CommunityGNGV Editorial Team4 min readLast reviewed September 28, 2026
In the North Somerset village of Blagdon, a quiet revolution in neighbourliness is unfolding — not over fences or in a village hall, but out in the fields, binoculars in hand. As Positive News reported in February 2026, residents have become enthusiastic citizen naturalists, helping to monitor the wildlife on Yeo Valley Organic's Holt Farm, where regenerative farming methods aim to produce food alongside, rather than against, nature.
The effort centres on four indicator species chosen to reveal the health of the land: dung beetles, skylarks, adders and hazel dormice. The long-term biodiversity survey was devised by Patrick Hancock, a roving ecologist who established transect pathways across the farm and recruited villagers to record what they saw. Sightings are shared through a WhatsApp group and logged on the iNaturalist app, turning casual walks into valuable scientific data. "Having all these extra eyes and ears out and about is very handy," Hancock said.
The farm's ethos sets the stage for the whole project. "We want to produce food with nature, not against it, and not to the detriment of biodiversity," explained Will Mayor, the farms development manager. That philosophy invites the community in — because measuring whether nature is genuinely recovering requires far more observation than any single ecologist could manage alone. The villagers supply that observation, and in return they gain a deeper relationship with the landscape on their doorstep.
For many participants, the most surprising reward has been personal. "It's made me far more attentive, to actually look closer and listen," said local resident Mark Sumpter. That shift — from walking past a meadow to truly seeing it — is perhaps the project's greatest gift. By inviting ordinary people to help track skylarks and search for dormice, Blagdon has shown how conservation can double as community-building. The wildlife gets more guardians, and the guardians, in turn, rediscover the wild richness humming quietly all around them.
