The Blog @ Shropshire Wildlife Trust

The last session!!!!

With lots of shouts of urrgggghhh! we dissected barn owl pellets.

When owls catch voles and mice they really enjoy eating the meat but they cannot digest the bones so they save them up, create a sort of ‘furball’ full of bones and spit it out - that’s what an owl pellet is!

When you start looking closely into these pellets you find an amazing selection of bones - some skulls, leg bones, pelvic bones, teeth and claws!

We could identify several vole skulls, some mice and even a rat (we think!).

We’ve finished now for the summer so a huge thank you goes to all those involved in the Minsterley Eco Club.

Have a great summer!

Go out and find some worms!!!!

This week we made wormaries however the worms were in short supply! It had been very dry and the ground was baked hard.

Anyone know any good worm charming techniques?

Did you know there is an annual worm charming contest in Cheshire? Fancy entering?

We also worked hard weeding our new flower beds and watering the plants.

The challenge for this week was to identify a few of the wild flowers and grasses collected in the meadow last week.

It was interesting to see most of the grasses were green whereas the flowers were brightly coloured - a sign that grasses are pollinated by wind but flowers have to attract insects for pollination.

We used the dried specimens to create colour collages as a visual reminder of the local meadow. Hope the cows enjoy it as much as we did!

The selection was huge - more than ten different types of grass and flowers such as red and white clover, dandelion, sheep sorrel, bugle and even an orchid!

Who can guess how the dandelion got its name?

The ecoclub goes on tour!!

What a fantastic session. We were invited by a local farmer to see a wild flower meadow before it was grazed by cattle.

Armed with sweep nets and pots we headed off to see the meadow. It was a sea of colour and swaying stems. We collected samples of as many different grasses and wild flowers as we could.

A damselfly was spotted, along with a bumblebee and a fox hole with three cubs peering out of it!

The Do One Thing task for the summer term was to ‘give a bug a home’. Excellent as we’d already planned to make an insect hotel! Wooden pallets, old plant pots, straw and twigs were collected and arranged to create a tower of places perfect for insects such ladybirds and lacewings.

Week 7 was the last week for some of the group so we held a celebratory bug hunt to try and find out how many minibeasts we had attracted to the school grounds. We had great fun looking under the logs in the log pile, shaking trees and peering at the ground.

Woodlice, worms, ants, beetles, butterflies and a frog were uncovered during our search.