Fundraising and Eco Club

Early this morning saw Adam and Tony loading the display to take to Tesco for our day of fundraising.  Once there other volunteers helped to arrange the display outside.  Inside there was a raffle.

And face painting.

Throughout the day volunteers helped to promote Foxglove Covert and raise funds for the reserve.

Back at the covert, even though it was cold and windy, 14 children arrived for Eco Club.  On our walk we searched for the leaves of  spring flowers.  Some were easily seen but others were so tiny we almost needed a large magnifying glass!  However we did find leaves of Celandine, Primrose, Bluebell and Dog Daisy.  The children also found several ladybirds continuing their hibernation in the Gorse.   We were lucky to see some frog activity and frogspawn in one of the ponds along Risedale Beck.

After refreshments we headed to the ponds to go pond dipping, not something we encourage at this time of year.  Today, according to the thermometers the water was one degree centigrade! Surely they were not recording properly?  Amazingly we caught 3 Spined Stickleback, caddis larvae, pond snails, water beetles and damselfly larvae.  It will be interesting to see what we catch when we pond dip again in the summer.

In the afternoon the first spring flower was photographed, a Primrose.

By the end of the day at the covert over 60 visitors had been recorded.  Fundraising all day, running Eco Club and covering at the Field Centre could not be accomplished without the support of so many volunteers.  A huge thank you to everyone.