Long-eared owls nesting in school again

An adult long-eared owl looks down from a playground birch tree

Two years ago I wrote about long-eared owls nesting in the science garden. Last year I kept an eye out for them but they did not appear to have returned. This year, a nest has turned up on the other end of the school campus, in a conifer tree situated in the middle of the nursery and early years playground. The school is scattered with birch and conifer trees which attract goldcrest, nesting greater spotted woodpecker and greenfinch, amongst other more common garden species .

The playground, as you can imagine, is very noisy at break times. I wonder whether the parents chose the site during the Easter break, whilst it was silent for almost three weeks. What a shock they must have had on that first day back!

Two owlets were originally spotted side-by-side close to the nest, followed by a younger one a few days later. Three dwindled to two, to one, since when no owlets have been seen. They might well all be alive and taking refuge in the garden of the house next door or just out of site in one of our trees. The children loved seeing the owlets and were very good at staying away from them when they were perching on the fence or went to ground. Whenever I have been over for a look I have been joined by a gaggle of five year olds telling me all about where they have seen the owls on different days. There is a great tit nest in a wall cavity in the same playground but the little ones seem much less interested in that. One can hear the chicks calling and observe the parents rushing back and forth, but the nest is tucked out of site so conceptually it’s quite a tricky thing to grasp for children so young.

I have been over with my nature club students and a couple of the older biology pupils who are particularly interested in ecology and natural history. What a great opportunity to be able to watch a family of owls during your break time.

Using Rewilding Patches for the Second Year

One of the rewilding patches, located behind the school dining hall

It has been very wet these past couple of weeks in Bucharest – good spring weather. The rewilding patches have turned from lank brown grassy areas to ‘mini jungles’ as one year 7 boy described them. Wildflowers and garden escapes are coming into bloom, to which the honey bees have responded in kind. No buff-tailed bumblebees or burnet moths yet though.

As mentioned in previous posts, it has been an ongoing battle to keep these patches from being mowed, with a number of parents perceiving them as looking unkempt and neglected as opposed to purposeful (which they very much are). The blue hearts go some way to identifying designated areas as having been allowed to grow wild as opposed to forgotten about.

Today I taught pollination and seed dispersal to Year 7 as part of their reproduction unit. These are two concepts that pupils often get mixed up. I myself didn’t help matters by saying wind pollinated when I meant wind dispersed once, but then it was last lesson on a Thursday! An ideal plant to use as an example at this time of year is the dandelion. About half are in full bloom and half turned to seed, so by getting out of the classroom pupils can see a before and after, often side-by-side. I had planned to incorporate the front playing field into the lesson, which had a good number of dandelions and buttercups having not been cut for a couple of weeks but, best laid plans and all that, it was mowed a few hours before the lesson. And so the rewilding areas became even more valuable.

Working in pairs, pupils visited the patches and took photographs of flowering plants on their iPads (I did introduce the term angiosperm, as many of them like hearing how usually I reserve such specialist words for GCSE) which they annotated. They were looking examples of adaptations for pollination and seed dispersal, focusing on whether done by insect, wind or mammal. Here is an example of one child’s work, taken from an area of no more than ten square metres behind the dining hall:

Pleasingly, most pupils got a view of a honey bee pollinating a dandelion flower with seed heads alongside, all happening at the same time. Next lesson we will pick a few samples to look at under the microscope. It is possible now to get high resolution images by placing iPad camera lenses over the microscope eye piece, so pupils will draw scientific labelled diagrams of their observations which is a skill they will be assessed on in four years in the alternative to practical biology paper.