Pond Study: Spring Fauna at the Pond {Week 4}

Spring Fauna at the Pond

This post journals the fourth week of our one year pond study in which we focus on counting the spring fauna at the pond. Here is our gorgeous pond this week:

Spring Fauna and Flowers
Today was freezing. So cold. Too cold for being outside too much!

Catch Up! If you’ve missed any of my pond posts, you can find them at the following links: Beginning Our Pond Study; Assessing the Pond; Checking Out the Pond Pollution and Ash Tree Study.

Goals for this Week

Today, week four of our year-long pond study, we concentrated on the fauna of the area.  Plans for this Monday were as follows:

  • Count the number of Mallards, Moor Hens, Seagulls, Geese and any other birds we happened to see.
  • We intend to do this every season for comparisons

Although this week was probably our least hands on so far, I think when we come back throughout the year, it will be this section which will show the most difference and that excites me.  (Did I actually say that?  Where on earth has the REAL Claire gone?  I can’t believe I’m getting excited about the possibility of more ducks!)

Counting the Spring Fauna at the Pond

The aforementioned ducks must have felt the love because they were surprisingly friendly.  Either that or simply freezing and starving, hoping we’d brought food.  We hadn’t.

Spring Fauna and Flowers
This male Mallard was pecking distance from my feet. Look at those colours. Stunning!
Spring Fauna and Flowers
And his mate

The girls were in charge of counting the mallards.  There were in all 23, 14 males and 9 females.  A4 counted the Canada Geese of which there were 2, as well as the Moor hens, just one pair, who were feeling very timid today. T11 counted the gulls, there were many (26):

Spring Fauna and Flowers
Our resident pair of geese
Spring Fauna and Flowers
I didn’t see the two together which is unusual, and wasn’t close enough to get a good photo. This a cropped one from a distance, unusual in that the bird was out of the water.
Lots and lots of gulls

Just two more birds…

Spring Fauna and Flowers
Easy to count. Just the one Mandarin duck
Spring Fauna and Flowers
And as a surprise this week we saw a raven!

Our Nature Journal

We finished our very first nature journal page:

Lots of fun seeing everything we had collected over the month
We collected up all the bark rubbings we had taken and cut them into the shape of our Ash tree. We had dried and pressed the ivy we had collected from the bark of the actual tree and stuck it so it was climbing up the bark rubbing tree. Clever, no?!
We cut out some crocus’ and jotted down weather and focus of weeks 3 & 4
I made a couple of envelopes stuck together to hold all the bits and pieces we had collected
We made a note book from card and the children chose some thing to jot down during each week. This I want to develop. I cut out cloud shapes and wrote about the weather and focus of week 1 & 2

It was so wonderful to create a note page which our whole family contributed to.  I’m sure it will bring back very special memories to look back on over the years.

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