Opinions, thoughts and adventures of a young conservationist.
As I had last week off school I spent five days in the Lake District, Monday to Friday, in the Lakes. We stopped at a place called Flookburgh which isn’t far from Kendal. Over the week I managed to see lots of different wonderful wildlife, scenic views and much more!
This time last week we had arrived where we were staying and we’d had a look around. We weren’t stopping that far from the sea, here are some of the photos I took on the first day.
Finding people my age who are like minded about wildlife and the outdoors is very rare. However, a few weeks ago I visited a blog by a girl called Emily who is a similar age to me. Her blog is called ‘Nuts about Nature’ and is quite similar to mine. It’s a brilliant blog and I highly recommend everyone follows this link to it – http://nutsaboutnature98.blogspot.co.uk/
After having a look through her blog and what she gets up to I decided to ask her if she’d do a guest blog post for me on my blog, this is the first one of these I’ve ever done and here it is.
Hi, I’m Emily and I have a little nature blog called ‘Nuts about Nature’. I hope you enjoy this guest post I am doing on Georgia’s blog today!
A little while ago I noticed that a pair of Magpies were collecting nesting materials from my garden. I’d never seen Magpies in my garden before, so I was so happy to see that they were using materials from my garden to make their nest.
After collecting a ‘beak-full’ of straw, grass and moss they flew straight to their nesting site. Which is very close to where I live, so I had a perfect viewpoint!
I also saw one of the Magpies break twigs off of a tree, some were longer than the bird itself!
A few days ago, after the Magpies had finished building their traditional untidy and large nest I decided to walk up to the tree they chose to nest in.
If you look closely in the photo above, you can see the female Magpie sat in her nest, incubating the eggs. The males feed the females throughout the whole incubating period. Also, I recently found out that when food is scarce, Magpies use their sharp beaks to dig little holes in the ground around their territory to hide food. They then cover the hole over with grass, stones or leaves.
Female Magpies usually lay around six green-blue eggs which have brown spots, she then incubates them for around two and a half weeks. Both of the parents feed the chicks, but if there isn’t much food around, the older chicks – which are usually stronger – get all of the food. This means that some of the chicks will survive.
I reckon that the Magpies finished building their nest approximately two weeks ago, so I’m expecting to see both the parents busy searching for food to feed chicks very soon!
I’m looking forward to seeing the Magpie fledglings fly around. They usually stay in their parents’ territory for a few months, normally until around September time.
It’s amazing that all the different birds are so busy at this time of year. Up until a year ago, I never realised just how clever and interesting birds are!
Today I created a new feature for my garden, a bug hotel. The bug hotel which I built, with the help of my younger brother, consists of four floors. On the top of the new garden feature I have a small log pile then on every story there are different materials which were naturally sourced from either my garden or my local woods. It was extremely fun and easy to construct, even though it was chucking it down with rain and we both got totally soaked! The different materials which I used in my bug hotel were bamboo sticks, bricks, planks of wood, broken plant pots, stones and rocks, hay, bark, twigs, logs, moss, tree cuttings, pine cones and mud!
To start off we stacked planks of wood and bricks up together then on the top I piled some logs up. Then with all the different materials that I had, I gradually filled every level bit by bit. In my new bug hotel I hope to attract a great variety of different creepy crawly’s and perhaps some small rodents.
Here are some photographs.
This morning my excuse for being late to school was much different to most. This was because I had a grey squirrel visiting my garden for the very first time! Grey squirrels aren’t a rare species but I was very excited when I saw that I had attracted a new mammal species into my garden. I managed to get a few photos in between getting ready but I hope to get lots more in the future. Here’s one of the photos that I took of the acrobatic squirrel.
Georgia Locock 