52 Weeks Wild #34

A collection of my wild moments from the past week...

Last week was quite busy.

I had a really good morning at Home, on the Roaches, assisting with the launch of the new "Wildlings" sessions for children aged 6 months to 5 years.

It was a good turnout for a first event with roughly 20 children attending. There was a mud kitchen, bug hunting, mini shelter building, stories, bird feeder making, a juice and biscuit break, hammocks to relax in and, of course, free play in the woods and clambering on boulders. This was my childhood playground and it's definitely a great place some for wild play!

This was one of the first sessions with a new member of the SWT team dedicated to the area under the new South West Peak partnership. There will be some Wildplay activities happening more locally to me through this that I am keen to get involved with where I can. Some of them might even fit in around school :)

I did another full day of Wildplay with a group of children with a range of needs, from autism to wheelchair bound and unable to speak, which turned out to be a really good day. Obviously, there has to be a range of activities to include those who can join in like anyone to those who need a lot of support and have very limited mobility but these included the dens, rope swings, bug hunts, mud painting and leaf printing and more sensory nature based activities for those that couldn't join in with other things. They're the kind of sessions where you need to have many tricks up your sleeve to adapt to whatever happens on the day and deal with wide ranging behavioural needs - not the kind of sessions I'd ever want to lead, but I am happy to assist with!

On Thursday, I went along to a volunteers evening with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust at the recently re-opened Whistlestop Centre in Matlock Bath. I was pleased they held the evening as I've not found a free day to pop over and visit since it re-opened so it was good to do so one evening. We did some river dipping and found bullhead fish, a few beetles and various larvae including stonefly, mayfly and cranefly. The pond dippers found some great crested newt efts and some nice hawker dragonflies were flying around the pond too.

cranefly larva - we thought a hairy eyed cranefly at the time but I'm not so sure now

swimming mayfly nymph

bullhead

Unknown bug!

ephemea danica larvae

great crested new eft

A  young robin

This weekend has been taken up by house things again...I've had a first look at carpets and ordered some samples, bought a load of paint, postponed my furniture delivery for a while (I'm not ready to take it next week as originally planned!), ordered some new radiators and the new bathroom... I also started stripping the paint off the door frames upstairs and ripping off skirting boards ready to replace them.  I'd really had enough of renovations last weekend but things are a little better now and by the end of next week (I hope) things will be better still and progress will be faster and actually feel like I'm getting somewhere. Up to now, it's felt like a rather Sisyphean task, never-ending mess and dust, constantly sweeping up and going home filthy, but things are about to take a turn for the cleaner which will do wonders for my sanity :)

I haven't managed any real time outdoors over the weekend but I did spot some conkers to be...

and sampled a sort of wild tea...

I bought this Blue John tea quite a while ago and only got around to tasting it this evening. I liked it. It's a breakfast tea (Assam and Darjeeling) with cornflower petals to put the blue in to it I guess. There were lots of Peak District varieties in the shop so I'll have to pick up a different one soon :)