Hello and welcome to all fellow Wrekin Forest Volunteers!

This blog was born following a prompt from Graham after a quick discussion in the bus on the way to Granville LNR and a very brief chat with our wise leader, organiser and instigator Pete Lambert on Nov 14th 2008. As a blogger of 3 or 4 somewhat diverse blogs already I thought it would be a good idea to set one up for 'The Volunteers' - so I volunteered!

Its purpose initially is to post a write-up with pics of each event that we - the Wrekin Forest Volunteers - become involved in which essentially is our Friday Forays mainly on Shropshire Wildlife Trusts various sites where we spend the day helping to maintain the areas and thereby encouraging their natural habitats.

We can spread the word about our activities by inviting our friends and families to follow this blog so they can all see the hard work we do, and of course, the fun and frivolity we always seem to have too!

Just email everyone with the blog link

http://WrekinForestVolunteers.blogspot.com

and invite them to subscribe by email (see top right) or RSS feed. This will ensure they get notified of each new post as it happens. Don't forget to do this yourself so you don't miss out!

Since joining the group just a couple of months ago what has amazed me is the wealth of information and individual skills everyone pools. It seems each member has an area of wildlife that's special to them - Penny's lichens, Nigel's spiders to name but two, not forgetting, of course, Pete's abundant knowledge of bill hooks and decurrent fungi!

This blog is OUR blog. It's YOUR blog and hopefully it will develop into an online area for us all to share knowledge, ideas, pics, comments, poems etc. So... if you have any photos for example, particularly of Friday Forays, that you'd like included please pick out one or two of your best and email them to me as soon after each Friday as possible. As this is a public domain I won't publish my email address here - I've asked Pete to email you all with it.

Also if you have anything relevant to local wildlife, conservation, rejuvenation etc you'd like to write about supported by pics please let me have your articles and I'll post them to the blog. And please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of each post: suggestions, what's good, what's bad etc -anything really. Just comment! I'll know I'm not the only one reading this then!

Most posts will have a link at the bottom that automatically runs a slide-show containing more pics of that week's event usually with a bit of light-hearted fun stuff too! My apologies for this to all members on all future posts. If you'd rather not be shot (as in camera!) please let me know or borrow Lis's hat and wear it the wrong way round!

You might want to get your own back on me by the way!

And the first ever post is...

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