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It was almost a year ago that I started my Explorer Award, and it hasn't turned out as I expected - it's been a year that has changed my life and unsurprisingly the lives of millions of people across the world, in many ways. In October I joined the online book launch of The Lost Spells, the latest book by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris - along with thousands of others - and heard them speak beautifully about the new connection with the natural world that many had found during the tightest restrictions of 2020 - "green became the colour that we drank to keep us alive", and "we heard birdsong with ears we had never known". Waking up super-early this morning with a head overfull of thoughts, I got a coffee and finished reading The Lost Spells and found one description in the Gorse spell that could sum up this year..."all helter-skelter points and angles". But also just as apt "quiet life is harboured in its criss-cross places" - for some of us this year has given us the chance and the time to remember the things that reset us - waking up this early for me would normally have been to race for a train to Inverness or to pack a van full of tools, and instead I am under a blanket reading about gannets, moths and thrift and quietly starting the day soothed by nature, before even going outside.

Beds going in nicely

That’s us to 2 nd week Jan 21

2 new beds

Today, period 3 was spent exploring out in the school grounds. We used the Woodland Trust British Trees App to help us identify the trees in the school grounds. We have quite a few Silver Birch (Betula Pendula), Scots Pine (Pinus Sylvestris) in the grounds. We took photos, and collected cones twigs and leaves from around the wooded areas for the next part of the day.

We drew pictures of the leaves, cones and sticks we collected

A few more pictures from week 4.

So recently we got a lot of rainfall so we went to go and check the camera trap and switch the SD cards. This time it was quite cold and there was a lot of mud where we walked! Also, because of current COVID restrictions the Cuttle Brook work party wasn't on so we couldn't do any work on the nature reserve... W/c 16th Nov 2020