GYCC Participants

The Count takes place on Saturday 24th June and Sunday 25th June. You can choose to count all weekend, for the afternoon or morning, overnight, or even for ten minutes while you have a cuppa! How you count is up to you.

You can take part from wherever you'd like (so long as it's in Yorkshire). Recline in your garden and watch the skies for swifts, search for bugs in your local park, go birdwatching in your nearest town centre or even join us on one of our nature reserves.

iNatuarlist is an online tool that's allows people across the world to record information about wildlife. You can use it to record your own observations and even get help with indentifications. The information and data you share enables us to better understand and ultimately protect our natural world.

Want to learn how to us iNaturalist? Follow our user guide to started.

Use our online form to submit your results. It's simple to fill in and the only information (apart from your counts) that you'll need to provide is your postcode. Use the downloadable checklist as a guide or a prompt - we'd love for you to share your ticked off checklists with us on social media!.

Submit your results

If you're using iNaturalist, your results will be automatically submitted as long as you are part of the Great Yorkshire Creature Count project (find out more about how to join the project). There may be a delay between uploading your sightings and them appearing on iNaturalist, so don't worry if you can't see them straightaway - they have to go through a verification process.

The checklist is designed to be easy to use and great for families and beginner Creature Counters. You can use it alongside the Seek app to identify everything you're spotting!

We've used iNaturalist in previous years, and those who want to delve into the detail are still welcome to use it. You can join the Great Yorkshire Creature Count project and everything you submit in the time window will be counted.

We know that spending time in nature is great for our mental health and wellbeing, and by noticing and recording the wildlife where you live you’re helping nature too.

There are more gardens than nature reserves in the UK and they provide crucial corridors, nesting areas and places to shelter for many of our much-loved creatures. But nature needs us. With their habitats destroyed and the pressures of the climate emergency increasing, even our once-widespread creatures such as the common frog or the garden bumblebee are declining.

Your creature-counting really counts – it gives us important information about how many different creatures are making themselves at home and what we all can do to protect them. The data we record will showcase how wildlife-friendly our collective outdoor patches are and give us an idea of how common species are faring in Yorkshire gardens.

The checklist species are those you are most likely to see in your outside space, and those we're interested to know more about.

We know that our gardens and yards can be vital lifelines for a much wider variety of wildlife - that's why we've included the box to allow you to record anything extra or special!