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Last week, our lecturer did a "live" class to let us explore the history of Kinghorn Loch. We learned a lot about how different groups use the loch and the area around it for activities like farming, fishing, canoeing, bird-spotting, walking, gardening, art and outdoor learning. We also learned about the history of the Loch. Craigencalt Mill has stood on that site since the 1500s and is still used for Hydro Power today. The legend of the Muckle Man is marked by a giant piece of sculpture that shows people have been living in and conserving wild places for centuries. Finally, we learned that geese and swans make good watchbirds! :)

Our team member AL is lucky to live in a rural area and has been able to break the lockdown blues by looking for wild places to explore near home. During the recent snow, he managed to capture two beautiful swans with his camera. More recently, he has been able to find a Robin and a Blackbird sharing the same space - we think maybe they are busy looking for a mate...

We spent the afternoon researching bird and bat boxes - how to make them and where the best place was to put them up.....

........We found some instructions on how to make suitable boxes for bats and birds......

........We loaded up the bike and trailer and took the boxes down to our patch. We took a ladder and drill etc with us and a compass to check that we faced the boxes the right way. The bird box had to be 2-4m off the ground and face North East and the bat box needed to be as high as possible (4m ideally - but we couldn't reach that high) and face South/South East. We found suitable trees, worked out the right direction for the box (and whether some sunlight could get through to the bat box to keep it warm while not being near electric street lighting - phew!) Then we put the boxes up!!

We went down for our final tree ID. Lots of the trees have now got leaves (although not all of them) and we thought that would help. There was one particular tree that we really wanted to ID and it now had leaves and flowers/catkins/cones (? whatever they are called!) but unfortunately despite all that and searching through all our books really carefully none of us could find out conclusively what it was. The closest thing we could find was a Hornbeam but even that wasn't enough like it.... We're going to have to go back even laster in the year to try again with that and the evergreen that has completely stumped us too... Maybe some fruit will give it away later?

We have been discussing birds again focusing on the start of their nesting season. We discussed what's involved in this and watched a couple of clips of birds building their nest! We then made a spring bird nesting mobile using natural materials and hung it in our gardens to watch birds collect their nesting materials