Having set up the promo banners and the chairs for the guests at this year's Ealing Wildlife Group Annual Photo Exhibition, four GoodGymers moved onto a more subtle task: advertisement. They disguised their GoodGym tops with green Ealing Wildlife Group bibs and worked undercover outside the Rickyard Cafe to convice the passers-by to become avid participants of the award announcement ceremony at the back of the cafe.

Alaa was the most effective of the quartet, and shared her surprising secret of succeeding in that double-agent job.

"You just keep smiling at the people who already look at the photos at the exhibition."

Alaa, Kash, Sevan and Steph used the time outside Rickyard to marvel at the beavers, foxes, pollinators, snails and birds on this year's award-winning photos. Many pictures, especially those from the abstract category, were stunningly creative.

Just before 1 pm the GoodGym-EWG agents set off to infiltrate the back of the cafe and found Sean, the leader of EWG, already giving the speech. Sean was about to announce the prizewinners of each category in the contest.

The last task of the session was to help out hoovering in the refreshments provided by Ealing Wildlife Group: nachos, tortillas, quiches, biscuits, sausage rolls, falafel, etc. Reducing waste is great for our environment, right?

Sevan, Steph and Kash, having not much to do, popped into a nearby lunch place, then came back to Rickyard around 2 pm to see if there is anything they could help with regarding the tear-down. Surprisingly, the EWG volunteers started the wrap-up early and the only task available for GoodGymers was taking down the last banner they had put at the bandstand!

GoodGym Ealing's second year helping Ealing Wildlife Group set up their annual photography contest's award ceremony was similar, yet very different to last year's. In 2023, they had been commandeering tables in the Rickyard and covering the prize winning photos on the central path of Walpole Park before the big reveal.

One year on, the single use bin bags, used to keep the winners a secret was out, deemed too wasteful and not a good use of plastic. The winning photos were free for the public to view all morning. The Rickyard too was already allocated for the reception, so no need to sip coffee and grab tables as they became available.

The GoodGym 4 were initially asked to put up banners and signage to make the participants and public aware that there was a reception happening and where it was. The second task was to lay out seating to give the attendees somewhere to relax in the run up to and during the announcement.

First up, Steph and Sevan worked out how to set up 2 roller banners. It was their first time doing this and it wasn't too hard. Once they'd constructed what turned out to be promotional sails, they realised that they needed to anchor them down too. Kash held the secret to achieving this, the code to the Rickyard's tool store, where she found string and scissors and, next to the door, hunks of concrete ex-statues.

Two more banners needed to be hung, one from the bandstand which was secured with string and the second, giant one didn't have a way to attach it to the Rickyard's fence. Some GoodGym ingenuity was needed to make it work 🤔. After some head scratching, they decided to drape it over the top and place some bits of concrete in the channel up there to hold it in place 💡. As the tallest, Steph clambered onto a table to do the deed.

Steph set up the outdoor space with tables and chairs too, while Alaa took control of the indoor chair set up. The group chose the cleanest chairs for inside, the ones that people wouldn't look at and avoid, giving them a wipe before setting them up in groups.

All the jobs were done for the set up, so on to the welcome and the reception...

Three GoodGymers made an appearance at Perivale Woods to participate in the third harvest mouse release at that site. The harvest mice are the UK and Europe’s smallest and possibly cutest rodents. They love living in messy hedgerows and brambles, that are constantly being cut back, often by the GoodGymers! Destructive human activity makes the animal habitats fragmented, and the pockets of wildlife, without corridors to each other, shortly disappear. The harvest mice were believed to be extinct in Ealing, and before Ealing Wildlife Group's project to bring them back into the wild, they were last seen in 1979 in Perivale. Last year saw several releases of mice in Ealing meadows, followed by field surveys, which found their nests - a sign that the project has been successful!

The sunny morning brought to the event many residents and GoodGym's friends from other groups - Friends of both Grove and Horsenden Farm: Sue, Fred and Livio. Elsa from the neighbouring Horsenden Farm was also around, attending to the cows grazing in the field.

The release participants marched calmly through the Perivale Woods, which are normally closed to the public, to the area by the ponds - the mice's new home. Keeping gentle and quiet was necessary when carrying tanks with the animals to spare the mice extra stress during the relocation. To promote the genetic diversity of the rodents, different tanks contained male and female mice from different backgrounds: some bred in Horsenden, others in Battersea, Dorset or Scotland.

The Scottish lasses, that the GoodGymers were releasing didn't live up to their feisty reputation. They behaved rather timidly, apart from Sevan's girl mouse who nibbled at his thumb when he clasped his hands around her. When she was out in the open, Sevan's mouse clumsily slipped off his arm and plunged into the scrub, Kat's mouse on the other hand knew pretty well what to do and jumped confidently into her new life, and Kash's took the wrong turn and walked up the GoodGymer's arm. Kat took some fantastic photos of the mice which you can see in the report.

On the way back, a group of GoodGymers and other mice releasers got carried away, marvelling at the surrounding nature, bug hotels and the hedgehog estates. They lost their way and wandered deeper into the forest! Luckily, an attentive girl spotted that the way back looked different than the original route and called it out. That was the end of quite a pleasant detour. Before heading home, the GoodGymers visited a unique straw bale house, The Bluebell Centre, chatted with the creators of the building about its history and had been invited to come back in spring to admire the fabulous bluebell display in the woods.

Kash and Sevan arrived in Walpole Park to find that a mini-transformation had taken place overnight. Thirteen photo display boards had been put up along the main path ready for Ealing Wildlife Group's photo exhibition.

In addition to the EWG volunteers, Park Ranger Jamie was there as well as Steve, the videographer. Jamie had been in the park late last night setting up the boards in the dark, while Steve was documenting the whole event for EWG.

"Steve, I'd like to be blonde, I'd like to be at least 5'8" and I'd like to be slim. Can you manage that?" - task owner, Emma

John and Emmanuella arrived soon after and the team learned that their task was to cover the photo panels that were being put up. The goal was to keep the winners of the photo competition under wraps until the grand reveal at 1pm. Kash and Sevan got started, covering kites, mice and moths in black bin bags.

It turned out that covering the photos was a 2 person task, so Emmanuella and John were deployed to commandeer chairs and tables in the Rickyard café, where the reception would be. They were asked to pounce as customers vacated their seats and hold the tables. This was ideal for John as he could grab a coffee and have a seat after parkrun. Emmanuella however was expecting to do something a bit more energetic to earn her good deed. Nevertheless, slowly they managed to take control of the whole area, allowing it to be closed to the public and prepared for visitors.

The second shift at Ealing Wildlife Group Photo Exhibition Grand Opening brought us a task which was a cross between patrolling and greeting 👋👮. Sevan and Kash used the green hi-viz to re-brand themselves as Ealing Willdlife Group volunteers and were strolling along the main path in Walpole Park with veiled artwork. Their job was to welcome people curious about the signs covered with black bin bags and tell them about the event.

They didn't have much luck at the beginning. Although they were smiling and making eye contact with passers-by, they didn't seem to capture enough attention. Maybe the covered photo prints with no logos didn't seem to be associated with the EWG vests GoodGymers were wearing? Maybe Sevan and Kash should have applied more salespeople's tactics? They eventually got someone interested in their pitch after that person's 3-month-old puppy 🐕 enthusiastically ran to them and rolled on its back in excitement, waiting for cuddles.

Today's EWG volunteer boss, Emma, decided to change GoodGymers' posts to more strategic positions. Now Sevan and Kash acted as funnelers, directing the exhibition visitors to the back of Rickyard where the event was going to take place. They grabbed some beaver project leaflets and placed themselves on two paths leading to the Rickyard café. That move was spot on. They gained much more of the public's attention and seemed to be in just the right spots as the arriving visitors were interested in the event and were looking for the entrance which was hidden at the side of the café.

Kash met some familiar faces, including the dad of one photographer whose works won second and third place in the young artists' category. In the meantime, Sevan picked up a side quest. Jo from LAGER Can had knitted an Ealing Wildlife Group postbox topper that had been recently installed on a postbox on Elers Road, so Sevan was sent to run and take a photo of it. As a reward, he found out who was the creator behind the Ealing charities postbox toppers. Maybe GoodGym Ealing should get one as well?

The final task of the shift was Sevan's and Kash's speciality: destruction 🧨. Three minutes before the announcement of the contest winners, the GoodGymers had to perform the "grand unveiling" in practice and undo their work from the morning. They unleashed their inner beasts and ripped the bin bags covering the art of the posts.

Sevan and Kash still managed to get on time to Rickyard to hear Sean, the leader of EWG, announcing the winners in each category and the overall contest. Second place went to Anna from Friends of Grove Farm, who captured the beauty of the hidden nature reserve in a winter landscape photo 👏 Grove Farm in North Greenford is a surprisingly stunning and calm woodland which GoodGym helps to maintain together with Friends of Grove Farm and LAGER Can.

If you'd like to see the woods and support Anna's and other volunteers' efforts, come and join us in October for a monthly litter pick and the conservation day.

Paradise Fields goes wireless

Beavers are coming to Ealing. They will return to live in our borough after more than 400 years in a rewilding project of the first area of urban London. Nothing can stop the beavers now! Or something can? Their beavers' new address, Paradise Fields at the far West end of Horsenden Hill, was not secure yet for the magnificent creatures. It was surrounded by wire fencing that could harm beavers. Something had to be done about it!

The last push

'Wow, are you training for something? Marathon? We weren't sure if you were coming to join us or just running'

Nadia, the enthusiastic leader of today's Big Beaver Volunteer Day, looked at us curiously.

Why not both!, we replied.

We introduced ourselves and explained briefly what GoodGym is about. There were a lot of new faces from Ealing Wildlife Group but we found some familiar ones too: Dr Sean McCormack, in charge of EWG, and Ben Morris, the founder of Clean Up River Brent.

Nadia, in a very energetic manner, described what we would be doing today, which warmed us up immediately (not that we had a chance to cool down after a 6km run from Ealing on a pretty hot day!). It was the final push from the volunteers before the arrival of the beavers and the stakes were high. Nadia ran the group through when and how to use shears, secateurs and saws, then passed the baton to Sean who asked:

Are there any questions about the beaver project?

When are the beavers coming?

Sean himself couldn't be sure yet. He told us that the aim for the Big Release is mid-October. The beavers were still being imported. How? Currently, the beavers were trapped and collected from the sites where they were not wanted. Can you imagine this? Apparently, in Scotland, they had too many of them. Export of beavers to Ealing is much more humanitarian than other methods of getting rid of them. Hey, who wouldn't like free housing in Ealing anyway?

The beavers already caught were first in quarantine before their move down to the site. There were rumours we would be getting a whole family of beavers!

As much as everyone would like to see the arrival of the rodents, the Big Day is supposed to be an exclusive event, open only to the most dedicated regular volunteers and prominent figures (possibly the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan!). To save beavers from the stress, their transport would be by a secret van, and the release would happen overnight.

Divide and conquer

After Sean's informative speech, we split into several teams:

• Litterpickers - wherever there's litter in Ealing, there's LAGER Can with their signature blue waste bags and pickers for everyone
• Aquatic litterpickers - led, of course, by Ben from CURB who couldn't wait to put his waders on and go fishing for some sunken treasures
• Support of infrastructure for water outflow - the two exclusive slots in that group were already booked by experienced folks
• Biological data recording - their focus was to gather intelligence to understand changes in the ecosystem after the beavers' arrival. There was a question from the audience about that task:

If we're doing the biological recording, do we need to kill anything?

Not this time.

That team was supposed to take pictures of insects found in the area.

• Wire fencing removers - the largest group with the highest priority task: remove hazards on the site

Guess which teams we chose to be in?

The wiring squad

You guessed it right. Destruction, dismantling, disassembly, you name it. Those are our favourite activities, and we didn't want to miss a chance to remove the fencing with wooden stakes. There were a lot of stakes! Some of the stakes had brambles tangled around them, others had small trees growing in between them, and the rest were trapped in twigs, grass and whatever could grow in Paradise Fields.

Before we even started chopping and pulling, our team had to resolve a big dilemma: where are the right-hand thick gloves? We couldn't find a single one in the gloves bucket.

Spoiler alter: they were in a different bucket.

The task was physically demanding and satisfying. The muscles had to be engaged to keep chopping and pulling the vegetation obstructing the fence, cut the wire, pull the stakes and big poles from the ground and then roll and carry the fencing.

After two hours of hard work, we had to make a move, refuel energy and run for our second mission of the day, the Tiny forest maintenance.

It was GoodGym's last gig at Paradise Fields before the beavers' reintroduction day. After our beloved mascots arrive, their new home is going to be closed to the public for at least a month to let the animals settle in the neighbourhood.