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Todays walk Tues 17 / 12

The National Cycle Network is bursting with birds. I'm starting my Explorer level Award this winter, learning more about them, and it already bodes well - on route 1 in Edinburgh, I noticed a sparrowhawk flying over the Sustrans office while, down the route a bit, a flock of waxwings finished off all the berries on the scraggy trees in the retail park car park at Craigleith. And earlier this month, I was on a work mission in Ayrshire, cycling route 7...another route chocka with different species. I grew up on the coast there and I only really rated the inland farmland for sleepovers at my friends' houses (overriding memory: cow smell and New Kids on the Block). But with the roads deserted, and the frozen fields warming in the early sun I realised how much I've missed. Wrens chummed me through the hedgerows, the corvid chorus of rooks, crows and jackdaws in farm trees was deafening, and every so often I got a glimpse of the orange armpits of migrant redwings, as I stopped to try to get a better look. And this week, on a day-off (cum-busman's-holiday) I biked along route 764 in Fife - an old railway line connecting Dunfermline to Alloa. This sort of path is perfect for birds, providing different habitats, food, song posts and cover. Dunnocks, blackbirds, great tits, starlings and very often a burst of fieldfares exploding out of a tree and winging their way across the fields flashing white as they went. There is so much to see through winter - the bare trees help visibility, birds are out looking for food, and migratory species arrive from Scandinavia and beyond to overwinter and capture our imagination. I am excited to begin.

I ran a Brownie meeting themed on Penguins, how they are under threat and what the girls could do about it. We played a game where all the Brownies were penguins. Each had a chair to represent an iceberg, but each round the chairs were removed to make the game harder and harder, simulating how the penguins' sea ice is melting. We also reused old cardboard egg boxes (rather than throwing them away) and made them into beautiful little penguin pals (see photos).

We are working on Christmas Eve, because we are good and want lots of presents. Only kidding! We are doing it to make up hours towards the Conserver Award and because we like helping nature. So far today, we have moved a whole twig pile into a better place for wildlife, planted some bulbs and prepared more wild flower patch. We are working all day.

The temperature dropped overnight last night and I woke up to a hard frost and blue skies. Before I got the Hogmanay chocolate fudge cake in the oven, I thought I'd nip over to the local path to see if the cloud of long-tailed tits I'd run into the other week was still there. I got back 2.5 hours later having thought I'd also just 'nip' up to the canal - route 75 of the National Cycle Network - for some John Muir Awarding. I've been reading Simon Barnes 'Rewild Yourself - 23 Spellbinding Ways to Make Nature More Visible' over the holidays - in it he talks about exercising peripheral vision, and revelling in the lost sense of listening. So I was well-armed with that advice to see lots - blackbirds, blue tits, crows, house sparrows, robins, magpies - and to hear those that I couldn't immediately see - bullfinches, great tits, goldfinches, wrens. And then I came across a bird in a tree, gently trickling out a quiet warble - small, brown, un-noteworthy. But I did note it, because I didn't know what it was. Chapter 14 of Rewild Yourself is called 'Magic Words' - in it Simon Barnes writes "For everything and everyone in the world there is a magic word. It changes your relationship for ever, increasing intimacy and understanding at a single utterance. The magic word is a name." I didn't have the magic word for this one. So I couldn't learn any more about it....how could I find out?? Luckily I have a camera and a guidebook and have met some astonishingly knowledgeable people through work, so having failed at the first flick through the book, I posted the photos and a call for help on the Sustrans wildlife volunteer group on Facebook. Within minutes the suggestion of a juvenile dunnock came back. Weird - I know dunnocks. But do I know juvenile dunnocks? Check the guidebook - yes, looks like it. Check the RSPB audio file - yes, sounds like it. More detail from a web search..." Dunnocks’ bills are black with a red base, their eyes are chestnut-brown and they have pink legs and feet." Yes yes yes. I have the magic word. In fact I have more than one word....Prunella modularis. My Latin book tells me Prunella is a corruption of bruneus meaning brown, modularis meaning modulation or singing. More searching...past local names include hedge chanter, shuffle-wing and foolish sparrow, the latter by dint of it being a favoured host for cuckoos. By naming this little brown bird singing in a tree, I have increased my understanding at a single utterance (and some time at the laptop). The long-tailed tits weren't on the original path, by the way, but an hour after I got home two appeared in the back garden - a place I've never seen them before. My mum suggests they smelled the chocolate fudge cake.

Together with 2 other women we formed a community action group when we heard Walkmill Community Woodland was up for sale in Dec 2018. Things have moved on in a positive direction and together with Moresby Parish Council and The West Cumbria Rivers Trust we have submitted a business plan to have the woodland transferred from County to Parish Council. Thus preventing the sale and conserving the woodland in public ownership. Our community group will evolve into a Community Activity Group which will exist to inform and listen to the community and arrange and promote community engagement and activities within the woodland. The aim being to improve social inclusion especially amongst vulnerable groups and increase health and wellbeing for all who wish to visit Walkmill. Included are pictures by the children and also our beautiful new logo designed and created by our lovely friend Tamzin.

28th November. Woodland maths activities.. We measured the heights of each child then represented them with lines of leaves. Rosie enjoyed measuring and comparing the circumfrences of different size trees. We went to see how progress was going removing the old rotten boardwalk by the pond and replacing it with a new path.

Willow, age 5 at the time, wrote a song about a fox!