Marine Awareness North Wales walks and activities
Marine Conservation Society North Wales begin in Sept 2000. Three students at Bangor University Richard Shucksmith, Emily Dicks and Nia Haf Jones started a local branch of the MCS beginning activities and events. Nia Jones (now Living Seas Wales Manager in the North Wales Wildlife Trust) describes some of the outreach work carried out. It initially began with a guided walk from South Stack to North Stack near Holyhead doing a seawatch as they went. The group raised funds for Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC). They followed this with other similar events which became popular. One notable activity was the weekend of training they did with their volunteers starting with lectures on the Friday evening then a weekend of Seawatching, rockpooling and dive searches with everyone returning for ID sessions at the end of the weekend. They organised BDMLR (British Divers Marine Life Rescue) marine mammal rescue courses for their volunteers too. At this point they were doing a lot of events and training on Harbour porpoises. They began to realise there wasn’t much data about the local Harbour porpoise population on Anglesey and so began to focus activities to monitor and learn more, adding to the knowledge.
