Spotting things: Birds and nests. Finding stories in the clouds. Finding things to look out for on a long car journey.
287 – Bird spotting
Thursday 20 March. Sunny. 17°C
Another dog walk and we’re looking for something new to ‘collect’ (see Nature play ideas: Things for kids to collect). B decides on birds so we decide to start a new ‘spotting things’ page instead. There are lots of jackdaws around at the moment. They’re hopping over the pavements and being noisy and funny.
First we decide on the rules. No flying birds! They have to be on the ground or in a tree or bush and they have to be near enough we can see them. B makes an exception that we can include flying birds if they’re holding things in their beaks…
We start off with the jackdaws and then get a larger crow, and seagulls. We head into the park and I can hear little birds everywhere around us. Trying to work out where they are becomes an obsession for me and B starts to get cross. She’s not interested in finding the noisy robins and blackbirds. I suspect it’s too hard. Back in the residential streets we both enjoy finding the large groups of sparrows (a ‘host’ or a ‘quarrel’ of sparrows apparently) that are lurking in the hedges. We can hear them but when we stick our noses up close to look inside they all go quiet. They’re the best players of hide and seek we’ve ever come across.
286 – Making pine cone bird feeders (again) >
< 288 – Checking in on the frogspawn and finding tadpoles
279 – Spotting Things: Nests
Friday 28 March. Cloudy, 12°C
This might be the first challenge we’ve done from the car (hence the fairly rubbish pictures). We’re driving on A roads a bit tonight and B is bird spotting when she gets obsessed with crows and nests. I see her point. The trees are still bare and we pass several groups of tall big trees, filled with crows, which have a lot of large nests clearly visible in the branches. We’re both fascinated. We’re not sure we’ve clocked before that some birds nest in groups. Once out of the car we start obsessively crow watching. It’s clearly the right week of the year. We can’t move for jackdaws attempting to manoeuvre sticks that are either a lot longer than they are or to wide for their beaks. They are fabulous entertainment.
278 – Emptying the garden pond >
< 280 – Collecting things: weird squidgy blossom
276 – Making stories in the clouds
Monday 31 March. Sunny. 16°C
We have big plans to go to the beach later but on the way to school B finds the perfect challenge. The sky is blue with little wispy clouds. She’s watching a plane going past them and says it’s looks like it’s blown out a huge white cloud. Then she thinks the little clouds look like flowers. I think they look like white streaks they have in cartoons sometimes when something moves quickly. Coming back they’re thinner and less pronounced. B says it’s like waves on the beach coming in and out. One looks just like a giant feather. It’s like a giant storybook.
275 – Collecting things: Blossom >
< 277 – Gathering ingredients for making potions… with a friend
271 – Spotting things on the motorway
Saturday 5 April. Sunny and windy. 15°C
Another driving day. When B was little we used to spot variations on rainbow cars (ie, red car, then orange car, then yellow car, etc). She’s now graduated to spotting Teslas instead. After an hour or so she’s getting bored and I try a new idea.
Me: “See what nature things you can spot. Animals, birds of prey, that sort of thing. See if you can get a photo of anything interesting for the challenge.”
Sometimes I worry taking photos takes away the fun but this adds to the difficulty for sure. I’m hoping for some lovely bird of prey shots. There were loads on the M4 driving up but the A12 doesn’t seem to have the same attraction for them. We get a lovely horsebox with horse visible inside which we stalk for a bit. There’s a lot of mistletoe in the still bare trees and she gets that. Then she spots the moon and gets that too.
There’s a lot she can’t react quickly enough to photo and she gets cross at that. Sadly most of these are roadkill. We spot a fox and a badger just a metre or so from each other and ponder what happened (were they fighting? Did the badger get killed first and the fox was scavenging). B gets upset and doesn’t appreciate the two other dead foxes, a dead hedgehog and what looks like a dead owl.
Coming back on the M4 a week later the kites are out in force. We stop at Legoland and spend the time in the queues watching them fly overhead and wondering what they’re spotting. There are at least four. As we drive further West we keep spotting kites that turn out to be seagulls and start awarding points for legitimate identifications.
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