Head to our Instagram or Facebook for a review and pictures of our otter survey earlier today, where we found positive evidence for otters and other interesting creatures!

Julia and Janie are kicking themselves for forgetting to take photos of the first art activity when we did printing onto cotton sheeting using flower petals as dye. Young Nature Watch enthusiasts selected from a huge pile of flower petals and made colourful patterns across white sheeting that had been soaked in apple cider vinegar. Each piece was rolled up and tied with string, then put in a steamer for the rest of the session to infuse as much colour from the petals as possible. The big reveal was done at home. This method is best done on silk so something to try again next year at home now that everyone knows the process. We give thanks to Tisbury Dental Surgery for their permission to snip their roadside roses and buddleia and especially to Debbie Condon for kindly giving access to a wide selection of flowers from her garden. 

We had a quick walk around the Community Garden and St John's Churchyard to spot autumnal berries and nuts and then our next activity was painting leaves of different shapes and sizes, then pressing them onto gift cards and tags to make colourful designs. Our YNW mothers also enjoyed the therapeutic calm of getting creative.

And our final activity was mushing up blackberries in a cup and squeezing the juice through muslin to make a pretty purple ink for painting with. Highly satisfying to see the ink squirt out through the muslin and a few children wanted to take the muslin home to have further play with them later!

 We had a fantastic woodland safari this month!

The sun was shining and we came back with treasure baskets containing beech nuts, birch bark, wasp galls, leaves, hazelnuts, larch cones, birch polypore and Alfred’s cakes!

We also saw lots of other beautiful fungi, invertebrates, heard buzzards and tits and, and although we didn’t see any mammals, we saw their feeding remains!

Head to our social media for some pictures of what we saw: Instagram post.

We had a very succesful harvest mice nest search last weekend, with 5 complete nests and 2 incomplete nests found in a previously unsurveyed area. Head to our social media to see our pictures! (For example, here is our Instagram post)

We had a fantastic owl pellet dissection event in August, where we processed a good number of pellets collected in the local area, from Semley to Teffont (and beyond), and found evidence of field voles, bank voles, water shrews, common shrews, pygmy shrews, wood mice, harvest mice and brown rats.

We are grateful to those who helped in any way, providing pellets, support during the day or coming to help us dissect! We know there are a few local fans of owl pellet dissection so there will be more events like this in future.

In the meantime, check out the Mammal Society's ID atlas and head to our social media for some pictures (more coming soon!).

​Andrew and Inés had done some moth trapping overnight in their gardens, on thankfully a dry night and so we had about 100 moths of all sizes to study. Some were kept in the breathable zip up see-through nylon carrier so that we could view them from all angles, whereas others were resting in darkened containers, nestled into the valleys of several egg boxes inside. Andrew had also brought some Cinnabar caterpillars feasting on ragwort, their only food source and an adult Cinnabar moth was spotted in the nylon carrier too. 

At one point we counted 12 Buff Ermine moths which had kept close to each other and interestingly had a wide range of buffness, from a sandy colour to dark apricot. It made us ponder why they displayed such a wide colour range. Some moths were comfortable with exploring human fingers, arms and even ears!  The star of the morning was a large Privet Hawkmoth which entertained us with its travels across the bodies of willing YNW volunteers.
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Some of the many other moths we identified included: Elephant Hawkmoth, Poplar Hawkmoth,  Swallow-tailed, Brussels Lace, Mother of Pearl, Large Yellow Underwing, Thistle Ermine, Peppered, Brimstone Moth, Common Footman, Buff Footman, Coronet, The Uncertain, Light Red Arches, Dark Arches, European Corn Borer, Small Magpie, Common Wainscot, Riband Wave, Small Fan-footed Wave, Yellow Wave, Bright-Line Brown-Eye, Early Thorn, Foxglove Pug and Common Rustic.

We had a great time building boxes for birds, which our participants took home to hang up, we hope their garden birds are already inspecting them for using them soon!

Have a look at our social media for pictures: Facebook and Instagram.

Last October, a few of our Young Nature Watchers headed to the beach for a nurdle hunt, learning about plastic pollution and collecting valuable data for environmental organisations fighting for the health our planet. You can see our results and the bigger picture on Fidra's map:

Head over to our social media channels (Facebook or Instagram) to find out what we discovered on our carrion beetle survey!