We are technically a week behind with Exploring Nature With Children, our focus this week having been our local bird life. Rose did find two rather lovely frogs in our pond this morning, so she spent time observing them, whilst I worked with the big girls on their IGCSE Biology prep.
We had a smashing nature walk earlier in the week; there is so much going on in the natural world. Unfortunately, whilst I had taken my camera along, the battery was dead, and I had managed to run over my own mobile phone with my car, so no camera there, either!
Rose & I set off bright and early; around 7am. On entering the park, we noticed lots of twigs all over the lawns, caused by the high winds in our locality earlier in the week.
Rose was soon greeted by her pigeon friends, hungry for their food, with the ducks and geese waddling along after.
The puddles of water left behind after the huge amounts of rainfall we have also experienced were frozen on this chilly, beautiful morning.
Some of the Mallards, and some of the Canada geese were busy pairing up with a mate. The pigeons were too hungry to bother with all that! Rose was covered in pigeons as usual, and she spotted one of the squirrels perched on a tree stump eating a nut. “He looks like he is doing yoga!”
We spotted both a Magpie & a Crow breaking twigs from trees to build their nests. They were so fascinating to watch!
We came home and worked in our respective journals.
Rose recorded the Magpie.
I sketched the gorgeous Mallard we saw the previous week.
Happy exploring!
Hi Lynn
Your duck portrait is fantastic! You have captured him brilliantly, he looks like he is ready to waddle off the page. You did well to be up and out at 7 am something I can only dream of! Come summer I hope it’s easier, it may be a necessity if we have long hot days. We have only seen rooks nesting but with wildlife club we made holders to put nesting material in, so I must put them out.
We tried to go pond dipping but there had been so much rain it wasn’t safe, so we will try again soon. We did walk round our pond, the children noticed where it had overflowed and we had a good look at the stuff washed out, including submerged plants, so we brought some home which has sparked interest. In fact the walk was fab we found part of a deer antler plus some old bones, which made my son happy. We poked around in rotting logs which made my daughter happy and listened to bird song which made me happy. Heard a green woodpecker but didn’t see it so it can’t go on my list! We don’t normally see much birdlife on our pond but yesterday there was more than I have ever seen, maybe the lake nearby is too crowded.
It was a great opportunity to talk about and see the effects of flooding which we now have a connection with. It also highlighted the problem of litter which made us sad, we did pick some up but it wasn’t safe to collect most of it.
Best wishes
Jenny
Wow! An antler! How wonderful, Jenny. Sad for you about the litter. It really is a problem. 🙁