Ringlets on the New Field

A Ringlet - photo taken with phone after matches yesterday

There are a lot of Ringlet butterflies around the long grass at the edge of the New Field at present ... how exciting!

Frogs

There appear to be a lot of froglets crossing the golf course today ... So we rounded a few up for closer inspection.

We caught a few so that we could have a  closer look. They have probably come from the lake, about 300m away. That is a very long we for a little frog! 

We think that there are so many because there are so many predators that would eat them. They all hatched at the same time and lived as tadpoles in the lake before metamorphosing into froglets. They like the long grass on the rough of the golf course because it is damp and full of little insects for them to eat. 

We are being a little more careful where we put our feet now!

More moths

We put the moth trap out again last night ... 

We caught a couple of Poplar Hawk moths which were big and very exciting.

Another cockchafer falls into our trap!

This chap had amazing camouflage...

A cardinal beetle popped in.

Water, water all around us ...

Today we looked at water and how it moves around us.

We looked at clouds ... Which show us water condensing in the atmosphere.

Note the flat grey bottoms that some of the clouds have: this shows us where condensation is happening and it is known as the dew point.

Once clouds have formed, the water droplets collide and get bigger until they fall as rain ...

It raining somewhat to the south of us in the Ashdown Forest.

The rain then lands on the ground where some of it seeks into the ground and travels downhill inside the soil. There are places where the water is forced up to the surface as a spring. It then flows as a little river into a larger river and eventually into the sea ... From whence it evaporates and the whole thing starts again!

Our dried up Spring ... Water flows from here after it has rained.

An ominous looking cloud came over us so we ran in before it could get us wet!

We put Mrs Clark and Mr Walker up the Spacenet to look for clouds ... They were looking the wrong way!

Moth Trap

Sunday night was clear and still and so we put the moth trap out to see what is flying around whilst we sleep. 

The children looked at the moths that we caught and they are going to try and find out what species they are using the UK Safari website. 

There were even a couple of cheeky cockchafer beetles in the trap ... So we had look at them too!

We then looked at how well camouflaged they were ...

(We thought that chap is normally on paler silver birch trunks!)

Spring is in the air!

We are redeveloping the 'Dump' area at school ... Turning it into a nature area that  we can explore and play in. 

We drew some plans of the area in Nature Club this week and planted some bulbs for next year .... Dodging the April showers!

Little Things!

Now that the cold, wet, windy weather and lack of daylight which have kept us indoors have abated, we were able to get outside. 

We went into the woods to find interesting things that we could look at under a microscope next week. 

We hunted high and low ...

... Finding lichens, fungi, leaves, bark, seed pods and, of course, poo!

We have labelled our samples and the Science Department are going to help us prepare the slides for next week. 

It is great to be outside again!