Hey Blog! This post is focusing on something I started in January but have not told you about – until now!
The Wildlife Trust is an organisation dedicated to preserving and restoring our natural habitat. Part of this is the active fieldwork, going out and doing stuff for the benefit of nature. The other part is connecting with people, particularly those who are going to do the bulk of the tidying up of the planet – the ones who will inherit it! Those are the small children who can be introduced to how wonderful it is to help those we share our planet with. Therefore, the trust has set up branches for young people, which include Nature Tots (preschool age), Wildlife Watch (primary school age to first few years of secondary), and Junior Rangers (teenagers). I am a member of both the Whistlestop Wildlife Watch, which Mum runs, and the Avenue Junior Rangers, however it is the second of these I am going to talk about, because on Good Friday I went to help at a public-facing family event!
The Good Friday event was open for all families, and was set up so that people could move around the field and visit every activity. There was more than just the Junior Ranger group there, but we were the only stall run by young people. Only four members of the group came on the day, one of whom was me, one of whom accidentally cut his thumb and went home, one of whom only stayed for a few minutes at our stall, and the final one was another home-ed person who I knew once and I haven’t seen since half a million years ago (AKA a couple of years before the pandemic).
The activity we were doing with the young families was a bird feeder making activity, making apple bird feeders. These are very simple. You simply core the apple, tie a knot in a piece of string to make a hanger, then poke a stick through the middle of the apple and through the loop in the string and there you have it! (You have to take care not to ram the corer into your hand, and not to slash yourself in the thumb when you’re holding it.) You hang the feeder up in the garden, and the birds perch on the stick to eat the apple. An optional extra is to poke some black sunflower seeds in the side, with a tiny hammer, for example the Kit Bailey© Certified Willow Stick Square Lashing Hammer™, which is a totally invented device made of two bits of stick tied together in a cross shape with a simple square lashing. I created a makeshift one when the group leader said we should have a miniscule hammer, and they worked, so I made a few more.
Quite a lot of people came to the event. We barely stopped from the point when the first family came over till late in the afternoon. There were only a few times when we could take stock of what we had left in the way of materials, but we had 60 apples at the start of the day, and by about 1-2 o’clock these had all run out! We then turned to making wooden bird feeders.
We used a brace-and-bit to make these feeders. This is a manual drill device, with a metal pole bent in a trapezium shape with a drill bit at one end and a knob at the other. You turn the handle in the top part of the trapezium and it turns the pole. The pole turns the drill bit, and the drill bit drills the wood. This cuts through the wood surprisingly fast, that is if the drill bit is sharp! Making this design of bird feeder, you drill four holes in two thin disks of wood, three of them in each piece in a triangle shape, and sharpen three sticks. These you push through both disks in the triangle shape, and tap down with a mallet. You then tie a piece of string through the other two holes, and stuff the thing with a couple of fat balls (bird food). You can also use wool, for nesting material, or anything else that birds may need. One of the people who made these was only two, but she still made most of it, though I had to finish off one or two of the holes and tie the string. Her dad afterwards complemented me on how I had handled it! It was a fun day, and I would like to do more public-facing events with the Rangers in the future!