Watching the wild

How was your summer? Are you in a drought-hit area, or did you escape the worst of the heat? As autumn gets underway there's been some welcome respite from the high temperatures, but it'll be next year before we start to see the full impact of 2026's extreme weather on wildlife, from insect eggs and larvae to creatures that eat ground and soil-dwelling invertebrates, like badgers and hedgehogs. Until then, the best thing we can do is to watch and wait, and keep caring for our nearby wild.

Here at Encounter we're extremely proud to announce that we're now working with NatureSpy, a not-for-profit conservation research organisation. NatureSpy sells a huge range of wildlife cameras, from Browning to Bushnell and other leading brands, and including their great value own-brand cameras, with profits going to conservation projects worldwide. A social enterprise, NatureSpy's values align perfectly with Encounter's, from connecting people to nature to ensuring minimal impact on habitats and putting money into doing good rather than making a quick buck. And if you buy a wildlife camera via any of the links in this email, you'll be helping to support Encounter, too: how good is that?!

 Finding out what visits your garden when you're not looking is incredibly exciting, and it helps you better support your wild neighbours, too. I can't recommend it enough, not least as a way of staying connected to nature during the colder months. I bought my first wildlife camera from NatureSpy many years ago, and I've been raving about them in my books and on social media ever since; the image of badgers, above, is a screengrab from a video I shot with a camera I chose with the help of their excellent camera picker feature. I recently bought their Ursus model, which is waterproof and (importantly for me) takes special rechargeable batteries. I'm using it to try and track down our local hedgehogs, as I'm worried that they haven't survived the drought.

I'm so excited to partner with NatureSpy, as they are such a natural fit with everything I believe in and am trying to do. Look out for trailcam content in the Encounter app and on our socials in the coming months – and hopefully, some hedgehogs!

I'm so grateful to the 4% of users who support Encounter with a monthly or one-off donation. We want the app to remain free of banner adverts and pop-ups, and I'm proud to have kept it that way so far. If we're to build the long-awaited search function we need more of you to help out, and you can do that here. Thank you so much!

Our partners Meaningful Planet continue to support the restoration of nature via several projects across Britain. They run off the vast (and fast!) EE network and you can check your coverage here. If you switch to them using our link you get 10% off your bills for life, and we earn money too. They offer free EU roaming, and you can keep your existing number. Please do consider switching to Meaningful Planet when your contract renews.

A daze of warmth

The summer solstice passed in a daze of warmth, birdsong and long, sunlit hours. This morning in my Suffolk village the dawn chorus woke me up at ten to three in the morning: given that there was still light in the sky until well past 10pm that's the briefest of nights. The ears are forming on our wheat and barley and the field margins are thick with poppies, mallow, hogweed and other wildflowers. The grassland butterflies are emerging, and swifts scream overhead.

We've welcomed a new guest contributor to our team. Sally-Ann Smurthwaite joins Linda Clark and Vanessa Wright, and is posting to the app covering nature in Wales. We want to continue to make the information in Encounter more and more localised, and I'm keen to find someone in lowland Scotland next, followed by Ireland, so please do drop me a line if that might be you or someone you know.

In May we successfully rolled out an update to Encounter. As well as lots of essential back-end changes that were needed to keep the app running well, we were able to include our most user-requested feature: the ability to tap an image in the Inspire Me or Learn More feed to make it bigger. You can also tap contributors avatars now, to read more about them, and donate to support us directly from the main menu: the three horizontal lines at the top right of the app.

What we haven't been able to do yet is build the search function. It's an expensive piece of work and we're looking for a corporate sponsor or generous individual to help us with this project. Adding search to the app will make it possible for you to find your own past journal entries without scrolling, locate posts about particular species, or compare one date with another. It will make the Encounter experience so much more satisfying and useful. Can you help us? Get in touch if so.

We’re so grateful to the 24 people who have donated to support Encounter so far, both monthly and via one-off payments. From the very start, I've wanted the app to be free of banner adverts and pop-ups, and we’ve been proud to have kept it that way so far. We need more of you to help out with a £3/month donation, or whatever you feel is fair. You can do that here.

Our partners Meaningful Planet continue to support the restoration of nature via several projects across Britain. A new mobile provider, they run off the vast (and fast!) EE network. If you switch to them using our link you get 10% off your bills for life, and we earn money too. They offer free EU roaming, and you can keep your existing number. SIM-only plans start at just £11/month.

The woods begin to blossom

Here in Suffolk spring has got off to a slow start, held back first by grey skies and then by cold winds. But that will only ever work for so long, and now the copses are full of chiffchaffs and carpeted in primroses, the cowslips are coming out and I've heard my first blackcap. Soon you won't be able to move for nightingales and cuckoos (well, not quite, more's the pity, but they should both arrive back on our shores soon). The fields are not yet beautiful, but spring is certainly hastening on.

It's been a while since I was last in touch with news about the Encounter app, but a lot has been going on behind the scenes. Firstly, we've welcomed our first guest contributors, Linda Clark, posting to the North of England, and Vanessa Wright, posting to Scotland. Our goal is to make the information in Encounter more and more localised, and finding knowledgeable nature-noticers in different parts of Britain and Ireland is part of that process. I'm keen to find someone in Wales next, followed by Ireland, so please do drop me a line if that might be you or someone you know.

We've also made some early inroads into the world of social prescribing – a key target for us when we created the app. Social prescribing is a way for GPs to recommend things that will improve people's quality of life, and it can work alongside other interventions like medication and therapy. The Encounter app is now being recommended by providers in East Suffolk, the Vale of Glamorgan and Birmingham, which is a great start and something we really hope to build on. And it's recognition that noticing nature, and jotting down the good things you experience, can create powerful change.

February marked a year since beavers were released in Northamptonshire as part of a project supported by our partners, Meaningful Planet. During that time the beavers have had a huge, positive impact on the local ecosystem at Nene Wetlands, and in September the first beaver kits were born! There's more on the project here, including some upcoming Beaver Tours. These get booked up quite quickly so do move fast.

Meaningful Planet are helping to restore nature via several other projects across Britain. A new mobile provider, they run off the vast (and fast!) EE network. If you switch to them using our link you get 10% off your bills for life, and you'll be helping to support the running of Encounter, too. We hope that more of you consider making the move as your phone contracts come to an end. They offer free EU roaming, you can keep your existing number, and you get a free beaver kit* of your very own to release into the wild when you switch.

Our friends at Wild Mosaic have produced a guide to rewilding as an ebook and we were thrilled to find Encounter in it. You can read and download the ebook here. With Wild Mosaic you can adopt a 3mx3m plot and get involved with the rewilding movement – even if you don't own half of Northumberland.

And finally, as you might have noticed, we've moved email providers to Ecosend, who plant trees! A small thing, perhaps, but another great fit for the work we're trying to do.

Change is in the air

Here at Encounter HQ a lot has been going on, and I’m very excited to tell you all our news. Firstly, and in response to a user suggestion, we’ve launched a new way for people to support Encounter via a ‘pay what you feel’ option that we’ll be flagging now and again in the app. If you’re enjoying using Encounter you can now contribute £3 a month, or whatever feels right to you: either as an ongoing ‘thank you’ or as a one-off. You can find more information and contribute by going here, or look out for the ‘Support us’ posts in the app. Don’t forget to add a little message for us if you do!

Also this month we’ve been thrilled to welcome Linda Clark on board as our first guest contributor. Originally from West Cumbria and now based in south Manchester, Linda will be writing about nature in the North and North-West of England. Posting nature notes and photos to Substack, she’s especially drawn to birds, hedgehogs, dragonflies and fungi, though she’s fascinated by all aspects of nature — particularly the overlooked and ‘hidden’ wildness found along canal paths. “I believe there’s beauty in the small details that many walk past. I hope to encourage others to slow down, look closer, and discover the beauty thriving right under our noses,” she says. We couldn’t agree more.

You’ll be able to see Linda’s posts if you have your location in Encounter set to a county in the North-East or North-West. We hope to welcome more guest contributors soon, and are particularly keen to hear from you if you have good nature knowledge and are based in Wales, Ireland or Scotland.

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In our last newsletter we announced our partnership with Meaningful Planet, the ethical mobile network which donates 10% of its profits to nature restoration projects – and it’s been great to see that some of you have already signed up! Switching to Meaningful Planet and using the promo code ENCOUNTER10 helps you restore nature and saves you money – plus, you’ll be supporting Encounter with every call.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m really feeling the natural world getting into gear again. Here in Suffolk the snowdrops are pushing up through the cold soil and opening their little white lampshades, the birdsong at sun-up gets louder every day, and the village sparrows are once again investigating my swift box. There’s more and more happening, and when spring arrives Encounter will bring you the absolute best of it. Keep checking the app and let us help you tune in to nature and the seasons. It really is such a joy.

Until next time,

Melissa
Encounter’s founder and director
Support us! 🌱

Introducing Meaningful Planet

If we told you there was a way to help restore nature, save money on your phone bill, and support Encounter at the same time, you’d be interested, right? Of course you would. Read on!

Here in Suffolk winter has finally arrived. Redwings and fieldfares have migrated in from Finland, Iceland, Scandinavia and parts of Russia, though not yet in the quantities we saw last year, and flocks of golden plover have moved south from Scotland to feed on our low-lying fields. After a gorgeous display of autumn colour most of the leaves have now fallen, and the elegant winter shapes of the trees have been revealed. I have to say, I’m glad of the colder temperatures: 20 degrees in November, with dog-roses flowering, was starting to feel very unsettling indeed.

Meet the mobile network that’s restoring nature:

We’re so excited to share the news that we’re teaming up with Meaningful Planet, a new, ethical mobile network which donates 10% of its profits to high-impact nature restoration projects. We’ve been so inspired by the work they’re doing with The Wildlife Trusts, which seems to us to be a shining example of how a business can create real-world change – and we’d like to invite you to come on board. Switching to Meaningful Planet and using the promo code ENCOUNTER10 helps you restore nature and saves you money – and you’ll be supporting Encounter with every call.

Meaningful Planet uses the unrivalled EE network infrastructure to deliver great coverage, high data speeds and excellent reliability. Its SIM-only plans all come with unlimited calls and texts, free EU roaming, UK-based support and no price rises, and of course you can keep your existing number. You can check their coverage map by going here.

Best of all, Meaningful Planet is offering Encounter’s users and supporters 10% off their bills – forever. So if you’d like your mobile bills to help fund nature restoration, as well as supporting Encounter, use this link to get your discount.

You’ll be seeing us post regularly about Meaningful Planet in the Encounter app and on our socials – and they’ll be shouting about the work we’re doing, too. Do follow them on Instagram and Facebook to keep up with all their news – and for now, do enjoy this photo of their co-founders, Nick and Richard, collecting seagrass seeds in the Solent. At Encounter we very much approve of this hands-on approach!

We’ve been continuing to track the progress of the seasons in the Encounter app, and it’s been fascinating to watch your species tags coming in, showing us what you’ve been spotting. If you’ve been using the app to help you notice nature but you haven’t yet created any journal entries, do give it a try. Research by our advisor, Professor Miles Richardson, shows that regularly making a note of the good things you experience in nature boosts your nature connectedness, which can have a lasting impact on your mental health and wellbeing – especially important over the colder months.

There’s so much to see, hear and experience over the coming months, from starling murmurations to feathery frost patterns, stubbornly singing robins to beautiful winter trees. Check the app every day for inspiration, and we’ll help you notice and connect to nature all the way through until spring.

With warmest wishes for winter,

Melissa
Founder, Encounter Nature

In bloom

We did it! Encounter was officially launched on April 16th at the Barbican Wildlife Garden in Central London. The rain held off, there were tadpoles in the ponds and blossom on the trees, and more birds singing than the Square Mile deserves – few of which would be there without the hard work of the brilliant garden volunteers. Here’s a short clip of my speech (a brisk wind and some extremely vigorous scooter riders drowned out the rest). Thank you to Kate Bradbury for the video, and to Martha Henson, Jane Adams and Peter Rogers for all their help and support on the day.

Encounter has been in the media, too. A few days after launch I appeared live on the Today Programme on Radio 4 (you can listen back here; it’s about 1hr 22m in). We were featured in the Financial Times (archived here) and I was interviewed for the Country Life podcast here. There’s more to come, including in the Guardian, Positive News and Wicked Leeks. We’ll keep the Press page of the Encounter website updated with links and news.

We’ve just rolled out an update which includes our most user-requested feature, the ability to delete journal entries, as well as some essential maintenance work. We’ve been adding user-suggested species and natural phenomena to the database of tags, too, and it’s great to be able to be so responsive to what people are seeing and hearing. There are lots more improvements on our wish-list, including support for video and audio clips. Thank you for coming with us as we develop the app.

If you haven’t reviewed Encounter yet we’d be so grateful if you took a moment to do so, as it helps other people find the app (and know that they can trust it). You can review it in the UK App Store, the Irish App Store or the Google Play Store. Thank you so much.

As we zoom towards 5,000 users (!) Encounter is still looking for a sponsor to partner with us and help us grow. This company would be doing a really good thing for people and planet: could it be the firm you work for? What about your partner’s employer, or that of one of your kids? Please do have a think and drop us a line with any ideas, leads, contacts or proposals.

Thank you so much for reading, and for all your lovely messages and encouragement. And do make sure you enjoy the coming weeks: now until the end of June is an utterly magical times to notice nature, whether you live in town or countryside. There’s just so much life going on, and so much hope and energy. Make sure you don’t miss a single day of it.

We’re hiring.

Yup, that’s right: we’re looking for a co-founder and business development lead to join us in the commercial development of the Encounter app and business, so that it can exist into the future and continue to do good. This is a great opportunity for somebody passionate about nature and enthused by building products to join a very early-stage business and develop a business/funding model, helping us to secure funding to take it to the next phase. 

Responsibilities:

• Development of the business case for Encounter Nature, and a vision for longer-term sustainability

• Lead efforts to establish the business/funding model that will sustain the app as its user-base grows, whether that is subscription-based, publicly or privately funded (or something else that we haven't thought of)

• Leading conversations with ethically aligned brands, charities and so on, to identify commercial opportunities that are a good fit for the app, helping us to make improvements and reach more people while remaining true to our purpose and vision

• Identifying possible public funding opportunities and making applications where appropriate

• Supporting the growth of users on the app, advising on and managing social media marketing, and how we get the app out into the world and into the hands of more people who will love it, so it can do good in the world

The right person to join us will be naturally entrepreneurial, enthusiastic about the natural world, and have experience in raising funds to support new ventures. You will likely have experience in early-stage businesses, perhaps of running your own thing, and learning and adapting as you learn what is the right direction. You will be a natural collaborator, good-humoured and proactive, happy to get hands-on with e.g. crowd funder platforms, app stores, and social media. 

While we can’t pay you lots of money, there’s potential for equity and/or payment via a share of funds raised in the role. If this sounds interesting, please get in touch for a chat by emailing melissa.harrison@encounter-nature.com.

And of course, if you know just the right person, please send them our way!

It’s all happening…!

How’s autumn shaping up where you are? Here in Suffolk it’s been a bumper year for conkers, and there seem to be more sloes in the hedgerows than last year. I’ve seen the first fieldfares, which come here to overwinter from places further north: they’re plump birds with a grey head and streaky, yellow-orange chest and they love fruit and berries, though if the ground isn’t frozen they’ll make short work of snails and slugs as well. Redwings have been arriving, too – another member of the thrush family. They tend to come in after dark, sometimes in quite large flocks, so listen out for their high-pitched, reedy contact calls on cold, clear nights. I used to hear them every autumn when I lived in central London, so do listen out wherever you are.

The last few months have been incredibly busy, incredibly stressful and incredibly rewarding. Building the Encounter app with our lovely Polish developers has been a very steep learning curve for me, but supported by our brilliant product manager, Martha, I’ve had the great privilege of watching a team of people work together whose brains function in a totally different way to mine. The prototype on my iPhone keeps growing in functionality, day by day, and whenever I’m asked to test another feature I feel an enormous glow of pride at how far we’ve come.

Our goal is still a soft launch in November, to you, our supporters, followers, and friends and family, and then a full media launch in spring, when people are going outdoors a bit more and engaging with the natural world. That’s when we’ll ask for your support to trumpet the app from the rooftops and help build our user base, which is what will help us attract partners and thus, keep the show on the road. In order for the app to keep doing good, we have to raise enough from partners to cover its running costs as it grows.

To prepare for our soft launch we’ll need some volunteer user-testers. If you’d be willing to have a play around with the Encounter prototype and give us your feedback, please fill in the form below. Unlike our earlier rounds of testing this will be a small group, so we won’t get back to everyone – but we do need a good range of people (and phones!) so if you’d be willing to help, please let me know.

Click here to volunteer

Finally, I’m excited to say that we have opened a new SEIS investment round. If you missed out the first time, but would like to invest a sum over £5,000 and help Encounter succeed, please email us at hello@encounter-nature.com.

If you’d like to read more from me, my book HOMECOMING is out in a few days’ time. It’s a fully illustrated nature journal designed to be a year-long course in connecting to nature, and I’ve written it for young and old, country and city-dwellers, nature newbies and experts alike.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading, and for all your lovely messages and support.

Sending you all good wishes for autumn,

Mel

And… we’re off!

First up, some good news: we’ve filled our first investment round, hitting our target of £50k! Thank you to the new investors who came on board, and to our existing investors who increased their support. It’s no small thing for a new business to achieve, and we are so proud to have raised the money to build the first version of the Encounter app. Further investment rounds will follow so that we can add more features, reach more users and connect more people to nature, so if you’re keen to join us on our journey, watch this space.

Since our last update we’ve been deep in the process of choosing a team of developers to create the app, which has also meant focusing in on (and carefully costing) our feature list. It’s very rare – and often a bad idea – for an app to launch with a complete set of bells and whistles; usually, a launch version is created with enough under the bonnet to be beautiful and useful, and more features are added as people ask for them, and when the budget allows. Encounter is no different, and it’s been a tough but really worthwhile process working with developers to whittle down our ‘must-haves’ from the ‘nice-to-haves’ and adding the ‘not-yets’ to a wishlist of future updates.

As part of that process we’ve had to choose between developers who said yes to everything on our list (very tempting!) and those who said no to some of it (or ‘not yet’, anyway). I went into the process wanting to work with the people who promised us the most, but soon began to feel cautious – and in the end we chose a team who had carefully costed everything and showed us why we could have X but not Y. There would have been nothing worse than getting into an ambitious build and then finding ourselves out of money because some aspect of it turned out to be much fiddlier than anyone had thought, and hopefully we have avoided that possibility. Now the exciting bit starts: the actual build!

Encounter: an early prototype

Dear supporter,

Spring at last! What a horrible, wet winter it’s been here in East Anglia, and in other parts of the country, too. But it wasn’t cold, and that’s meant lots of spring phenomena have arrived early – and while it’s cheering to see an orange-tip butterfly in early March, it’s a bit of a worry, too. Still, we’re now getting firmly into the territory of bluebells and cow parsley, our local nightingales have arrived and are singing strongly, and I’m hoping for a cuckoo any day now. The next six weeks or so are by far my favourite time of year.

Since we were last in touch we’ve been beetling away making a rough prototype of the Encounter app and sending it out to our brilliant volunteer testers. We’ve got a fascinating set of results in from them, and now we’d like to open it up to you, our supporters. If you’d like to get involved, simply watch our tester video below, then click here to fill in a short survey, which will remain open until 6pm on April 26th. Thank you!

Another nice bit of news comes from Miles Richardson, our resident Professor of Nature Connectedness. He’s just finished writing his second book, Nature’s Gift: A year-round guide to reconnecting with the natural world. It’ll make all the latest research accessible to everyone, and will be out in autumn this year.

Spring is the perfect time to get outdoors and start noticing nature, as new things are happening every day. Look and listen out for joyfully screaming swifts overhead, most of which will arrive from sub-Saharan Africa around the end of April/start of May and will leave again in just eight weeks; take a moment to glory in clouds of greater stitchwort on roadsides and verges, newly leafed oaks with their soft, copper-coloured foliage, and holly blue butterflies dancing about on sunny days.

Two free nature identification apps that will help you learn more about what you see and hear are the birdsong recognition app Merlin (make sure you download the appropriate data pack) and Flora Incognita, which is miles better at recognising plants than anything that comes built in your phone, and also stores a list of what you’ve seen, which is useful when you inevitably forget what it was (or at least, I do).

The less mowing, strimming, weeding and other ‘tidying-up’ you can do in your garden this spring, the better – so consider that your excuse! Birds are nesting and need to be left undisturbed, wildflowers, if allowed to bloom, feed bees and other precious pollinators, and every square foot of lush, tangly vegetation means more aphids and caterpillars, which are vital baby food for chicks. To do your bit for nature, let it go, let it grow, and enjoy the wonderful, wild results!

Wishing you all the joys of spring –

Mel