Millbank Primary School
Growing Together To Be Our Best
What lives in our garden?
The Children were really busy photographing and recording all the creatures that they could see in the garden and flowerbeds around the school. It was all part of the "bug survey" and Kew Gardens "Great plant hunt" that took place during the lunchtimes.
They took some great photos of a wide variety of caterpillars, spiders, beetles flies, centipedes and plants too.
Green Gang have been building lots of different 'bug homes & hotels' over the past few years and everyone seemed very surprised at the number and variety of wildlife that we found. Of course our resident swallows, pied wagtails and other birds were keen to eat most of them, but that is the whole point of attracting the minibeasts. It is all about supporting the food chain and the minibeasts will attract other wildlife.
Just by looking at the different creatures the children learnt more. Some of the creatures had wonderful camouflage such as the peppered moth caterpillar that was a wonderful twig mimic, lots of different spiders and beetles that blended in to their surroundings.
We also saw all the ladybirds in their bright Aposematic colours warning predators that they tasted pretty vile and should keep away. Bees and wasps too with their yellow banding but this is copied by the harmless hoverfly.
We collected some of the specimens we found and used the old QX3 microscope, they still do the job but are a bit outdated compared with today's technology but it has a 200 times zoom so with a bit of extra light we could see fine and we really enjoyed seeing the creatures in a different and new way.
You can see us using the microscopes when we went pond dipping at Cog Moors andthere are lots of wonderful dragonflies and damsel flies which we would love to see in our own pond.
If you want to lern more about insects British Bugs including a section naming all the various bits of a bug.
The RHS has a site dedicated to wildlife in your garden called "Wild about Gardens."
There is the Wales Biodiversity Website which is a bit dull for most people but it does link through to the Pledge4Nature website we have been encouraging people to visit.
