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In the last 10 days I’ve been out litterpicking on the National Cycle Network four times – once with my mum, once with one of our Sustrans volunteers and twice alone. Each time I’ve felt great about how much we’ve removed from the routes – between one bag and seven bags - and either had some good chat with who I’m with, or some quiet to just enjoy being outside alone, away from a screen and listening to winter bird calls. I’ve also been thanked by passers-by every time I’ve been out, and had some nice conversations with some of them...contact that is welcome, when a huge amount of interaction this year has been virtual. These have been chances to be completely, mindfully, in the moment – and, with the exception of noticing a change to the litter being collected…facemasks, disposable gloves…it’s been a chance to pause the pandemic for an hour at a time. Good for me, good for the Network.

Today we walked from Bishop's Sutton to Ovington. The start of the walk was along a country lane where we had to be careful of cars. We walked south of New Arlesford and passed many watercress beds. This walk was mainly a river walk and we saw a lot of water fowl- swans, herons and ducks. We were very lucky to see a kingfisher. There are a number of other walks we saw signs for including the Watercress walk, the Wayfarers walk and the Itchen Way. There seems to be some nice river walks in Ovington and a pub and we think may go for a river walk there in future. The rivers there are important habitats for otters.

The Elderbank Nature Hunters planted more trees and learned about how to look after them. Everyone got a chance to plant their own tree.

This week I did some work on my spreadsheet, sorting out the pictures and noting them down on excel! In these photos you can see a fox, a mink and a moorhen. :) W/c 9th Nov 2020

Last week we took traffic surveys to see how much traffic was on the road next to the wood. Today in maths we made graphs to show in a more understandable way how much traffic we saw. We had to draw it in a colourful way so that people will pay more attention about how much we need to reduce our carbon footprint. The graph show there are more cars than we thought. Public transport is very poor where we are so you can only catch 2 buses a day.