News

Monday, 14 July 2008

Visit to Broomhaugh School

It was at the Bird Box Day at Riding Mill Village Hall in early March that I met the head teacher of Broomhaugh First School, who was delivering the brightly painted bird-boxes that the children had enthusiastically made for the new garden. In discussion I learnt that the school had a strong interest in wildlife and ecology, and even boasted an Eco Council made up of representatives from each year group. I was invited to come along and meet them, and see the work that the children had already done to attract birds and other wildlife to the grounds.
So it was that I was taken round the lovely school grounds by five delightful children, the Eco Council representatives from each year group from Reception to Year 4. They showed me the bird feeders outside the reception classroom, the little wooded area where they make dens, the newly-created environmental garden with its log-piles, vegetable plots and dangling apples for the birds, and the herb garden where I was offered a handful of chives to chew. (One ran inside to wash them for me first!) The children were really keen and remarkably well-informed, and as we went round we discussed what else we might do to help the birds around the school. One suggestion was that we made nests and put them up in the trees, but after explaining that birds enjoy making their own nests for their babies, we decided it would be better to put out a selection of nest-building materials, like bits of wool or moss, to help them.
I was then invited to come to a Science Club after-school activity, to give a little slide presentation about the birds that might be seen around and about the school grounds. I chose a dozen or so birds that I guessed might have been seen at or under their bird feeders, or in the hedgerows around the playing field. This took a little longer than the twenty minutes I had planned, due to an enthusiastic audience with plenty of comments to make! When shown a slide of a peanut feeder with a coal tit and a grey squirrel on it, I was eagerly told that they eat grey squirrels in Corbridge (yes, apparently they are sold in the butcher's shop there, so someone must eat them, and we do want rid of them don't we?) So much for the coal tit. I thought I would show a slide of a male and female chaffinch together, and explained that the female was drab so that she wasn't easily seen when sitting on her eggs. The children were asked if anyone could think of a reason why the boy bird was more brightly coloured, and the answer came immediately from one of the youngest boys: "so they can show off and fly fast". I thought that was a pretty good reason!
The next part of the session was to go out into the grounds with a little clipboard and a tick-list of ten of the likeliest birds to show. It's a good job I had thought to include a space for 'Others', because all we saw was one wood pigeon and a rook flying overhead! Not even a blackbird showed itself! But never mind, several of the children came back with a full list ticked after five minutes (probably all just round the corner!), and we had all had a good time anyway!
I'm looking forward to going back and doing another session sometime in the autumn term.
Denise Morphet