During this week’s Meadow and Woodland nature study we were going to keep our eyes out for autumn flowers, seed heads, berries and fruit. I hope to do this bang in the middle of each season to compare. We did manage to find lots of examples which I took pictures of, but actually we spent most of our time exploring a spillage of some sort of chemical into our brook and the measures the conservators had taken to limit its negative effect.
We were walking over the bridge when we noticed the brook to the left of us wasn’t flowing at all. It seemed to just stand still:
We looked over the other side of the bridge to see if the same could be said for the water there. That was when we found some floaty blow up sausage thing spanning the entire width of the brook:
At first we thought people had dumped it there. That was until we caught sight of the blue rope attaching it to the banks either side of the brook, which made it more purposeful and put there for a reason. So we wandered a little bit further on, up the brook, until we came to its outlet:
Here, another blow up sausage spanned the width of the brook. This time there was an obvious difference between the water either side of the sausage:
The brook runs through the gardens of the houses built on the edge of the common, and this outlet marked the spot the brook joined the common again. We surmised that there had been a spillage of a contaminant of some sort, maybe in one of the gardens, which the conservators were trying to contain. The sausage was doing its job – look at the difference in the water behind it with an oily substance floating on the surface and in front of it, which is clear and had no signs of oiliness:
Once we had learnt all we could about pollution spread prevention, we went on an autumn treasure hunt to find seed heads, flowers, fruit and berries. And the treasure hunt was very successful. We found
- Wild fruit:
- Berries:
- Wild flowers
- and seed heads:
Didn’t we do well? All in all a really fabulous nature study session.
Wow! What beautiful finds this week. You have such a lovely area to explore. That sausage thing is working great. I hope they get it all cleaned up safely.
Blessings, Dawn
Thanks Dawn 🙂
I like the way you have goals for your nature study, but don’t let these goals rule your walks.
Worry not, I don’t 🙂
I love how you never really know what you are going to find. I guess that is the reason for studying a specific area over time – you get to see the changes as they happen. You may be inspiring me to take my boys out 😉
Good, I’m so pleased!
I really need to learn the names of flowers and plants, I’m so horrid at it. I just give them all the same names and sound really confident when I say it.
Ha, ha. I’m getting a bit better. The more we do the better I get. I really enjoy it though so that really helps me remember!
That is really interesting about the pollution spread prevention. Something we have noticed about Autumn here (this year at least), is that the trees went straight from green to brown, for the most part. I would really like to find some wild fruit, but no joy so far, other than the rose hips I collected that went maggoty!
What a productive nature walk. Love the photos. Great lesson on pollution as a bonus. Are the wild apples edible?