It's that time of year.

Spring has sprung!
Dwarf daffodils and corydalis
I've heard the first chiff-chaff, seen the first butterflies (small tortoiseshells), watched the first swallow in the field, had a jar of rescued frogspawn sitting on the doorstep.  Most of us see and note these things and many also report them to Nature's Calendar as part of the Woodland Trust's great phenology project tracking the seasons.
Lots of other surveys are starting up for the summer season as well, within the last few weeks  we had details of several  in our news round up, there were Easter bunnies (well, hares and rabbits actually), East Anglian bats, Cornish basking sharks.

Send details of what you've seen.
People need records of not just the cute, cuddly and unusual but also the potentially dangerous in the form of invasive species for example quagga mussels or asian hornets and also things that simply shouldn't be there like small plastic pellets known as nurdles.
We keep details of many of the ongoing surveys like these on the website, you'll find them in the volunteering section, the page is Surveys and Fieldwork, find it here.

Do you take part in the RSPB's Great Garden Bird Watch in January? There are other similar surveys going on all year round, some to do at home and other more organised events like BioBlitz to join. You find details of these too.

Do you need records or run events?
If you're running a survey or organising an event like these we'd be delighted to add the details to the page, 50 listings are free (yet another free service from CJS!).  If you know of a survey or event that you think we should be listing but isn't there please send us the details and we'll check it out.

Volunteering is popular and much needed.
So much so that our volunteering section has got so large that we've split one of the the main pages into two separate ones.  You'll now find full or part-time placements in the same place as before: here But we've moved what we call Regular volunteers, those where you're needed for a day once a month or an hour or two once a week, these are now here.
Both pages are subdivided as well, the Placements page is broken up according to what you'll be doing whereas the Regular volunteering page is split according to geography, under the usual Regions that we use elsewhere.