Stick Season Across Swindon – How You Can Get Involved 🍂

Choose a few trees you pass regularly, perhaps in your street, park or on your dog walk.

Across Swindon the leaves are falling off trees, a sure sign that stick season is nearly here when our trees finally stand bare. This is the moment the Woodland Trust’s #NaturesCalendar project is asking us to record.

Nature’s Calendar helps scientists track how seasonal change, local weather and maintenance patterns affect our trees. By noting when trees in your area become completely bare, you’ll help map how climate change is reshaping Swindon’s parks and open spaces.

Each record adds to research showing:

🍁 Whether trees are shedding earlier or later each year.

🍁 How heat, drought and storms are impacting tree health.

🍁 What these shifts mean for wildlife that depends on them through winter.

This national project is powered by local observers. Your sightings from play parks to garden walks feed into one of the UK’s oldest environmental databases, running since 1736. These records inform everything from national climate studies to local tree management decisions and biodiversity protection.

How to get involved:

🍁 Choose a few trees you pass regularly, perhaps in your street, park or on your dog walk.

🍁 When they’re completely bare, note the date and take a photo.

🍁 Add a record of the bare trees at naturescalendar.woodlandtrust.org.uk

🍁 Keep watching season to season as each record builds a long-term picture of change

I’ll be continuing my own observations across Haydon Wick and the wider field as we move into winter, helping ensure our local environment remains part of the national story.

#NaturesCalendar #Swindon #HaydonWick #PrioryVale #CitizenScience #TreeHealth #ClimateScience #StickSeason #UKNature #Biodiversity