Feed

We met Sarah from the RSPB for the first time and she told us what did she did for her job. We went to the Hogganfield Loch to explore and see what birds we could find with our binoculars. We found loads of different birds including swans. The swans at the Loch are very use to being fed by humans so they were very confident and came over to us.

We are Avenue End Primary and this is our John Muir blog. This is one of the ways we will share our experiences and journey. Our mission is to become outdoor learning experts. We want to develop our skills and knowledge to help support younger learners in our school.

More Than Birds…the lesser-known Extreme song (hoho…#90shumour). Although my Award is focusing on our avian friends, sometimes it’s hard to keep from being completely dazzled by something else. Last week I was working in Aberfoyle on route 7 and popped into a wildlife hide in the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, where I got a close encounter with this fellow. Squirrels are often referred to as sitting in the shadow of their tail – this comes from their genus name ‘Sciurus’ coming from the Greek words ‘skia’ (shadow) and ‘oura’ (tail) – and red squirrels are masters of this. In other mammal news, one of the band-members of Extreme was apparently called Patrick Badger. Who knew.

Walking along the strand line at Allonby I collected 70 plastic bottle tops and 62 cotton wool bud sticks (see photo), unfortunately we didn't walk far. It's motivation for me to arrange another Marine Conservation Society beach survey and beach clean. With data from these surveys MCS have campaigned to get cotton wool buds plastic free and for soft drinks deposit return schemes, which Scotland propose to launch next year. Interesting to find 2 Smarties plastic lids, Nestle removed production of these in 2005 so my orange Smarties lids is 15+ years and the blue one having Rowntrees imprinted on the reverse is 32+ years as Nestle bought them over in 1988. It shows the longevity of plastic as they still look perfect! 27 Jan 2020 update, I found another smarties lid at St Bees, this could become addictive, now I have a d, h and k.

So my sons and I collected discarded soft drink bottles (37) from the roadside around where we live. We used them at our local church and they became amazing Christmas decorations which sparkled by day and shimmered by night. Now Christmas is over, they are all safely sorted for recycling. It is a sad reality that litter we drop around the countryside enters our watercourses polluting our sea by wind and rain either directly through streams and rivers or via our drains. I created a proportional word cloud of the soft drinks we collected, the bigger the word, the more we found. I have decided to do my own version of a dry January and boycott all bottled and canned soft drinks, I will use my refill and help the planet. I hope others join me.