Days 6~10

There’s still time to get outside and join in with the Wildlife Trusts’ 30 Days Wild for the rest of June! The project encourages people to do something wild each day and share their Random Acts of Wildness on social media to inspire others. I have been posting our daily adventures on Instagram. Here’s what we’ve been up to during Days 6-10:

On Day Six we made a magic potion with fallen petals and as my son stirred he made a wish… He wished for an adventure!

 

 

We enjoyed a hedgerow harvest on Day Seven back in the meadow. We picked some delicious gooseberries, making sure to leave plenty for the birds, and are looking forward to cooking up a tasty treat!

We had a wonderful time playing in the meadow again and we were delighted by the presence of three admiral butterflies.

 

We were lucky to be able to spend another day at the beach on Day Eight! I think his wish for an adventure came true today!

A lovely morning spent with friends exploring the rockpools. The children (and us too) were excited to find this crab. We also found two other green ones and my son was fascinated watching how they move and bury themselves in the sand. It sparked some reading up about them at home and from the pictures in our book, he thinks it was a shore crab.

We walked along the strandline and collected a bucketful of plastic. There was still so much there but we felt better for doing our little bit to make the beach cleaner.

Our friends had to get back but we stayed a little longer. Piggybacking and chasing each other across the expanse of flat, wet sand, splashing through the shallows and running between the rocks to discover desert islands… It was so freeing running like that. And I love replaying the film I have in my head of his giggles and shrieks as he ran. I have committed to memory the feeling of his little sandy hand in mine…

On Day Nine my son spotted the most amazing beetle! And it really was. Bright pink and green! But I wasn’t quick enough with the camera. It sparked off a hunt for more insects and we found ants, a caterpillar, millipedes, a moth and lots of slugs!

 

 

 

Inspired by our insect hunt, we thought we’d make our own minibeasts on Day Ten. So we spent a rainy morning making a bee, slug, snail and spotty beetle out of mud!

All our Random Acts of Wildness have been just that. I haven’t planned any of them. They have been spontaneous or have been inspired by previous activities or wonderings.

Looking through these past five days there seems to have emerged a theme though of respect for the life we share our planet with. Thinking about using fallen petals so that the bees still have plenty of flowers; being conscious of taking a little where there’s a lot when foraging; ensuring we carefully put back the creatures where we find them in the rockpools or in the garden; setting aside a few minutes to reduce the negative impact we, as humans, have made on the life that occupies our precious oceans.

The feeling I get when we are out enjoying nature is both exhilarating and restorative. It is where we belong. But in relatively recent times we have become lost and disconnected. We are a part of nature and it only seems fair that we do our bit to help it. All living things have an impact on the natural world, ours seems to be the greatest. I hope in involving my son in enjoying and respecting nature, he will grow up to make his a positive one.

Last year we made a conscious effort to help the wildlife in our garden by making a bug house and a place for bees to drink from safely. This year we have sown seeds for bee friendly flowers and hope to do more before the month is up!