Wednesday 12 October 2011

WOW! Club Hedgehog House

This week in WOW! Club, we made a place for hedgehogs to hibernate. We used materials that we had around school, so it would cost us absolutely nothing! We knew that hedgehogs often hibernate in compost heaps or piles of leaves, so we tried to recreate a 'posh' version of that!
We started with a waterproof collapsable bin that we had in school. This would form the main part of our hedgehog house.



We chose a corner of our garden, under a tree and out of the way.




We smoothed the earth underneath and put a layer of leaves down. We then used lots of canes and twigs to build up a teepee type affect around the bin to hold it in place and to protect it and stop it collapsing. Gradually we built a 'cage' structure over the top, leaving a part at the front for an entrance. We took debris off our compost heap, such as bamboo leaves and wove them around the twigs. We packed all the spaces with dried leaves to insulate it all.










Taking some bricks and some old log roll, we then built a little entrance hole to our hedgehog house. We tipped two big containers full of leaves on top of our house and patted then down.






Finally, we added some hay and some leaves inside.

We were very pleased with the finished product... we just hope the hedgehogs like it as much as we do!




Saturday 8 October 2011

Ms MacRae shares her seed prize with WOW! Club

Buying food for our birds at school can cost a lot of money....  but this week Ms MacRae bought in two big bags of seed for the birds at school.

Ms MacRae had won 'Best Bird Garden' which is sponsored by a bird food company called 'Just for Birds'. She had an article all about her garden in 'Bird Watching' magazine, Summer Special. Her prize was 4 big sacks of food. As we have lots of hungry bird mouths to feed over the coming winter, Ms MacRae donated half of her prize to school!

Here we are with the two sacks she brought in... this should keep us (and the birds!) going for a while!

If you would like to help out WOW! club by donating any feed, feeders or anything to help us in our wildlife club, then please contact Ms MacRae at wildlifekate@live.co.uk.

We make our Bird Table!

With screw driver and electric drill in hand, Wildlife Club were keen to see if they could make our new bird table this week. We opened the box and spread all the parts out. We looked carefully at the instructions and split the task between all of us so everyone would get a go at using the drill and playing a part in the bird table's construction.

Everyone worked really well as a team to create all the different parts of the bird table.....






Within about 40 minutes, we had managed to complete it. This table is a bit smaller than our main one and we are positioning it close to the hedge to try and attract birds that might be a bit too nervous to come right up close to school. We were all pretty proud of ourselves for managing to build it!


We will now keep an eye out and see what starts visiting.

We also added a new feeder to the live stream camera.... this is a bird 'cookie'... suet in the middle and seed all around the edge. We are sure the birds are going to LOVE it!