Take a look at this clip. It was filmed on Sean's camera and shows a stunning cloud of Starlings wheeling about over Newport before dropping out of the sky and into the conifers around the College to roost for the night. The UK's Biodiversity Action Plan was recently updated. It makes changes to those species and habitats defined as priority species or habitats. Some of the new entries are pretty shocking: Hedgehog, Toad, Eel and the dear old Starling. It's sad to think that a bird once so fantastically common it was almost a pest is now considered a national target for conservation effort.
My overdue attempts to make a listening post for the Troll Trail led me to try something new today - blacksmithing. That's a bit of a grand word for it; all I needed to do was to open out the jagged end of a scaffolding pipe a bit, but it was still a rewarding feeling when the metal squashed out into something more ear-friendly.
My Dad's wood-burning stove, made from an old Calor Gas bottle, was perfect for heating up the metal until it was red-hot. Then I hit it with the round end of a ball pein hammer while my dad held the glowing pipe and tried to avoid the sparks.
East Cowes Primary students braved the cold January weather to make their contribution to the East Cowes Alphabet on Castle Street under the artistic guidance of artists Nathan Holt and Aaron Fletcher. Reception and Year 1 children got stuck in with paint, sponges and stencils to add to the Alphabet. A is for Apple, H is for Helicopter, S is for Spectacles, Sunglasses and Shades and Z, well Z is for Zombies of course.
The alphabet is part of the 'No Barriers' project for East Cowes supported by SEEDA. Look out for more additions to the alphabet and more art on the hoardings in the coming months.
Here you can see the progress of The Purple Kite from scraps of plywood pulled out of a skip, to the proud craft bobbing down the river below.
Like many projects, it's the result of a random turn in a conversation. Simon was talking about beavers and streams, then someone said it would be great if we had an inflatable canoe for surveying wildlife in ponds and rivers. After that someone came up with a challenge: to make our own boat in one day using only recycled materials and anything we could find in the office and then row it across the River Medina and back.
We set to work in our small inventions workshop in East Cowes which SEEDA let us use specifically for making interesting and unlikely creations.
Well, we failed to make it in a day and cheated by buying a box of screws, but as it took shape over the next week our confidence grew that it really would stay afloat with us in it. It started to feel more and more like a proper boat.
The more organic lines can be explained by the fact that there weren't any plans and there wasn't a lot of measuring either.
This picture shows Simon ceremonially rubbing down the boat in whiskey prior to painting.
There are two port-holes in the bottom for observing fish, rocks, seaweed and submarines passing beneath us.
At this point the boat had no name, but by means of a democratic process, we arrived at The Purple Kite. The Island 2000 logo is of course a purple kite and it is also, by sheer coincidence, the rarest species of sea-bird to be found in the British Isles, never having been observed or recorded.
Launchday - a last minute attack of responsibility makes us leave behind our recycled life-jacketsand ask Offshore Challenges next door if they can lend us something more reliable. They hand us two very swanky-looking flotation devices which, we understand, deploy automatically as soon as they get a whiff of sea-water. Simon instructs us that if it looks like we're going down, we're to throw them back onto the land to avoid the punitive cost of recharging the gas canisters. Luckily, this isn't necessary as itturns out to be the driest rowing boat we've been in. We launch from the slipway just next to the car ferry, waved off in a cloud of sherbet by well-wishers and curious staff from Red Funnel. The oars are on the long side for such a small boat, but The Purple Kite is easy to row and very manoeuvrable, sitting surprisingly high in the water. If you'd like to see the cross-Medina escapade for yourself, take a look at the Youtube video below.
We're now planning to produce some commentaries on the wildlife of the Isle of Wight's rivers, viewed and recorded from the water. The Purple Kite is availablefor other water-borne tasks or challenges. Any suggestions?
Here is the splendid Petrobius maritimus or Sea Bristletail. It's really a bigger cousin of the Silverfish you may be more familiar with. These were found holing up in a crack in that big lump of limestone on the way down from Flowers Brook to Steephill Cove. We were walking the coastal path between Ventnor and the Botanic Gardens on Sunday with Friends of Nature members (part of the Gift to Nature scheme - have a look at the website for details) and these fabulous things were one of the winter wildlife highlights.
Deep in the woods perched the pixie. I hid myself in the bracken and waited for his magic to begin when suddenly he turned his impish eye in my direction and spoke: "Can I come down now please, Dad, and why are you crawling about under those leaves?" And so the spell was broken and I returned once more to the human world.
Yes, it's the mighty Ganoderma - the Artist's fungus, so called because any patterns or words you might scratch into its soft underside will stay there for good. The sturdy shelf that Jerry's sitting on here is just the fruiting body, the toadstool bit; the rest is devouring the insides of its Beech tree host. This particular one is in the woods behind the Griffin Pub in Godshill, a place I visited for the first time last year when I went on a fungus foray there run by the IW Natural History Society and led by Dr. Colin Pope. It was absolutely brilliant - loads of weird and wonderful things, plus an excellent rope-swing for the kids and the pub to look forward to on the way back. Toadstools, rope-swings and Guinness - it really doesn't get any better.
The Island Storytellers are a group of people committed to the oral retelling of stories and poems, whether they be traditional or modern tales. They are organising a storytelling festival, ‘Ferry Tales’, in May 2008. One of the elements of the festival will be a storytelling competition at which storytellers tell stories inspired by a piece of artwork. The Arts Team are working with the group tocommission a piece of art for this competition which can be used as a prompt by storytellers.
