Family Wildlife Day 2023: Highlights
The sun shone and we were greeted by a sea of smiling faces as the families came into the garden full of anticipation for our tenth annual Family Wildlife Day on 25th June. You can read about all our fabulous experts and see more photographs here.
Bird Ringing
The first area to visit was the bird-ringing demonstration with Mark Lucas. He and his assistant had already placed mist nets in a quiet, private part of the garden, close to trees where birds are likely to fly through. Any birds trapped are quickly removed and put in little bags where they keep calm in the cool. Mark then took each of them out in turn, identifying the bird and explaining how to tell the age and sex. These details are then recorded along with their weight, a ring is put on their leg and they are released completely unharmed. The information from the rings can be recorded over the years to build up a picture of how far resident species move around and where migratory species spend the winter. The demonstration went on throughout the day and the highlight was a spotted flycatcher, such an unusual bird that Mark has to check his notes to see which size ring to put on the bird.
Family Activities
Moving through into the garden, early arrivals were able to see some of the moths that had been trapped overnight, although not as many as sometimes, there were four new species recorded for our garden, including a lackey moth. In this area visitors were also able to find out much more about local butterflies thanks to the expertise of volunteers from the Butterfly Conservation.
The majority of activities were taking place in the play area. Here the children were delighted to be able to handle snakes and slow worms and get their hands dirty dissecting owl pellets. Most of the bones found in the pellets were from rodents, probably voles, as shown by the very large front teeth. Children were able to take the bones home with them to take in to school the next day for show and tell.
Children could also make dragonflies and colour in bees on the relevant stands and they were able to test their knowledge of birds in Yorkshire on the interactive bird map. All visitors could learn about bats, hedgehogs, woodlands and composting on some of the other stands.
Finally, a pond dipping session gave plenty of interest: children were able to handle the water snails and ramshorn snails, looking at the very different shell shapes. They could also see newt tadpoles (efts), which, as one of the children quite correctly stated, looked like an axolotl! Other pond-dipping highlights were the water boatmen and watching the damselflies flying over the pond.
Here is some of the feedback for a highly successful day:
thank you for an informative and fun day today. My grandsons loved it and we adults learned plenty too! Everything had just the right pitch for the young ones. They’ve held snakes, stroked a slow-worm, looked at pond life, made and coloured a dragonfly, dissected an owl pellet, looked at unusual moths … all for £5 each ! And, of course picked up some important environmental information too.
