Feed

Last thing we did on our Fun day was take down everything we had set up and do another litter sweep of the areas we used after that was a cleared we had to climb as wee described as a really funky tree and get one cracking photo of us on it nice way to end our John Muir fun day and we are very sure we all came home from this day knowing a lot more about nature and that we did a little to conserve it and had fun along the way.

One of our last activities of the day was the tree leaf treasure hunt this was a short activity using an identification chart to find different types of leaves belonging to each type of tree . We split ourselves into 2 groups and had 15 minutes to find as many as possible this got very competitive and actually ended up a draw between the 2 teams . We are very lucky in our local forest that it has a wide variety of tree species and the game we played educated us all on the different types of tree we had in our local forest.

As we picked trees to place the boxes around the forest we had did a little homework on were was the best place to locate the boxes so we all had to factor in certain things such as the height of the boxes between 1 and 3 metres for the birds and 10 and 15 feet for the bats , What fixings we used to attach them to the tree , making sure there was nothing was obscuring the entry to boxes etc . We will looking forward to see if they have worked and hopefully we can add to our fleet of boxes already placed.

Getting ready to place all our Bird/Bat boxes in all we had managed to get 6 Bird Boxes and 2 Bat boxes ready to place around our local forest . Hopefully because its the start of February this gives the Birds/Bats time for nesting etc. Later on through out the year we will monitor them all to see if they are being used and hopefully find out what species was using them . This will we hope give our local Bird/Bat population a little help .

Recorded a lot of Wood Mouse activity but there was also a Vole that came into shot. I'll show the Cubs the difference and we might look at focusing on attracting smaller mammals again to try and get a better image. Vole, on the left= small eyes, shorter tail, small ears, rounded snout. Mouse, on the right= larger eyes, long tail, very large ears, pointed snout.

At last a decent photo of a badger on our camera trap! The camera was placed overnight and low down on a worn badger path by one of our Cubs.

When each scout hits a certain limit the inevitable happens they fall which most of said is the most exciting part and most thrilling but until they get to that point they have to use all the balance and strength to get a high as they can without falling . This is a great activity for getting out into the forest because there is no lack of decent trees to run it and above all its great fun.

After our lunch we were onto our next activity which was the crate climbing we had rigged up our climbing gear to a huge tree so we could do the activity . Each scout wore a climbing harness and helmet then was clipped onto the rope and had to climb each crate one at a time to see how high they could climb without falling over this gets the adrenaline pumping especially when your about to fall.