Wild July

I've rather enjoyed not blogging daily since my wild 13 months ended, so much that I found even those weekly posts I mentioned have been too much effort for me this month!  July has been busy with the end of term and well, just life in general, but I thought I'd do a bit of a round-up of how I've stayed wild in July...

I started the month by joining in with a new challenge, Wild Arena's 31 Day photo challenge, in which they provided a theme for each day and the idea was to photograph it on the day, within nature if possible. Right up my street! I've only one photo left to submit now to complete the challenge! I might share my challenge photos in a post here soon.

This month I did my first two days as a paid member of staff with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and 3 voluntary days too. I worked a day at a nature event at a reserve in Chesterfield doing bee themed crafts for children...

and also at Toyota's Eco Day in Derby, where I was in charge of mini shelter building for 'rockies' (and a bit of bug hunting between 'customers')...

There was the usual monthly Forest School session, at which we did some simple shelter building and leaf bashing / natural painting to create a bit of art

I also did day of Wild birthday parties (observing, in advance of leading them) and the first Wild Wednesday of the summer holidays which was a day of pond dipping, campfire bread and nature themed crafts. I was mostly in charge of pond dipping and we found a lot of dragonfly exuviae (I brought a couple home for the collection and gave some to the pond dippers) plus one freshly emerged dragonfly drying out...

We were also making bug homes, woodland medals and 'cloud binoculars' which don't really look like much but then when you get back to the visitor centre and see a child who'd made them earlier in the day lying on the grass cloud spotting through them, suddenly they seem quite worthwhile!

Also this month, I went on another RSPB seabird cruise around Bempton Cliffs, 'Glorious Gannets' this time. It was brilliant as always and there were so many puffins - more than I've ever seen before (even on their puffin cruises!). I got some great views of diving gannets too, right in front of me! 

Turnstone pecking at a crab

I'll end with a couple of other random wild moments from this month...

antler moth