Pond Dipping

When I volunteered to accompany my daughter’s school class to their day trip to Castle Howard (see above photo) I did it with enthusiasm, as I really love Castle Howard. For all of you who are not familiar with it, CH is a fantastic stately home in North Yorkshire, famous for being the main location of the ITV’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and the two-hour 2008 remake for the cinema (see my entry on 14/11/08) and even features in Garfield, Tale of Two Kittens. Sorry, I’m digressing. Anyway, I was expecting a free to the castle and ground, which are usually rather pricey and a lovely day-out with my daughter and her school mates. You can imagine my surprise when last Wednesday night I got a letter from school saying that I should wear wellies: wellies to get into Castle Howard? The weather was gorgeous, 26 degrees C, so why wellies? Because the trip wasn’t exactly to the castle but to the Arboretum Trust - Kew at Castle Howard, where the kids were supposed to be guide in the exploration of the arboretum ecosystem! Too late to find a suitable excuse!

Anyway, when we got there after a 50 minutes’ coach journey (it usually takes no longer than 20 minutes to get there, but I suppose overcrowded coaches move slowly), our first activity was ‘pond dipping’, ie. fishing out with nets from the Arboretum Pond wetland minibeasts to identify them later.

(At least I had the chance to show off my new wellies!!! Belette, can you see what's on them???)

Anyway, our first activity was ‘pond dipping’, ie. fishing with nets in the Arboretum Pond to find wetland minibeasts and identify them later. The idea was to fish out the "beings" like this:

But we ended up with two boys falling into the pond, getting totally soaked and having to change them into girls' clothes (fortunately jeans are unisex!) as they didn't have their own spare clothes with them.

Please see our findings below. We caught water shrimps, water snails, lesser and greater water boatmen, etc. etc.

By the way, did you know that the greater water boatman swims on it's back, looking like a little rowboat. The saliva of the GWB is toxic, and that is how it kills prey. It also may hurt quite a bit if one bites you! They do eat tadpoles (from my daughter's notes).

After a quick lunch sitting on logs in the middle of the wood, we moved to next activity, “meet and hug a tree”. I found this especially interesting as we were on a beautiful hill surrounded by mighty trees (no telephone coverage, yuppy!) and the kids learnt to appreciate the trees as living beings.

We ended our educational visit exploring the woodland habitat trying to find more minibeasts on the ground and identifying their living conditions. My task was to lift logs from the ground and the kids had to find some minibeasts and then create their habitat (where are my gloves when I need them???). Our group found some beetles, a light-blue caterpillar, a horrid slug and a couple of worms. Yuk, I can still feel the itching all over my body!!!

In conclusion, in spite of all those minibeasts and small water incidents we went home all happy, it was a lovely day in the countryside, away from phone calls and computers, a much needed boost of oxygen!