Veg Plotting

It's been great to have some quality time on the patio this week culminating in yesterday's partial eclipse. With the live stream to hand, we had fun with our hastily made pinhole projector (a piece of card pierced with a paper clip), playing with the image on our hands, then NAH decided to carefully take a direct photo of the sun. 'That won't work', I said, and I was right... and wrong, with the sun behind its mackerel sky veil blazing forth as usual, but the camera lens flare revealing a perfect image of the sun bitten by the moon. * = I've had Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon on the brain all week; especially appropriate for yesterday's celestial event.

  I've tracked something every month of the year so far, from my diet through to screen time. This month it's the turn of the Wildlife Trust's 30 Days Wild initiative and I'm having a great time adding a bird's foot, plus a little drawing of what I've observed that day to my tracker. I also get a daily email packed with information and ideas and seeing we're half way through the month I thought it would be fun to convert some of my little pictures into a Nature Spotting Sheet as suggested a few days ago. Five of them are from my garden, two are from going to the archery field (hare and poppies), one is from the Donkey Field (Meadow crane's-bill), and one from Tuesday's day trip to Blenheim (orchid). How many of these have you spotted this month? You can construct your own spotter sheet here , or simply use the ones provided on the activities section on the Wildlife Watch website. Great fun!

  Regular readers know I'm a bit partial to taking part in citizen science initiatives such as the annual Garden Birdwatch and Butterfly counts, as well as one-offs such as Flying Ant Day. These are a great way of gathering huge datasets over a wide area that are simple to do and repeatable. This year I've upped the ante by becoming a monthly  Riverfly monitor for my local stream, Hardenhuish Brook. This scheme is designed to survey the key freshwater invertebrates which are more sensitive to pollution and also taps into my Masters degree. The wider the variety and number of these found each month gives an idea of the water's quality. In the photo you can see me assessing the stream for those invertebrates usually found in the more urban locations by kick sampling the stream bed for 3 minutes and then having a look at what I've caught. March's net had a bullhead fish as well as plenty of little wriggly things to identify! It's been great to use the skills I ac...

Regular readers know I do love a good citizen science project and I'm happy to announce the latest one is launched by The RHS/Bumblebee Conservation Trust today. What can be better than watching bumblebees bothering our flowers on a sunny day and help science to boot? From today until 31st May we're asked to submit our sightings from our gardens and parks around the UK. Why is this important? Well, bumblebees are a vital pollinator for our garden flowers plus crops such as apples, tomatoes and peas. When the weather starts to warm - even on the odd warm late winter's day - queen bumblebees emerge from hibernation to find nectar to help fuel themselves and gather pollen to feed the hungry larvae of worker bees back in the nest. Finding out the exact situation in springtime is particularly important as habitat loss/climate change may be affecting the availability of springtime flowers, which in turn will affect the successful establishment of bee colonies at the start of the ...