As part of our Eco School’s work on the Biodiversity topic,  the Eco Committee planned to add more wildlife homes to our school grounds. We have so far purchased a hedgehog home, a bat box  and we have more bird boxes which we are going to re-paint and put up on trees around our grounds.

Here you can see a picture of our janitor putting up the bat box on a tree with some help from pupils. We had to consider carefully where to site this as bat boxes should ideally face south and should not have fences or  branches in front of the opening to obstruct the flight of the bats when they emerge.

You can also see some of our Eco Committee painting pallets yellow. These pallets are going to be used to build a bug hotel in our Eco garden. We chose yellow as it is a colour that attracts insects. Our bug hotel will be sited near our wildflower garden and will hopefully  provide shelter for a wide variety of insects, perhaps even some pollinators which will be great for our  apple and pear trees and the other plants and flowers, fruit and vegetable plants that we grow. It will have pipes, canes, bricks with holes through them and straw added to make homes where insects can live.  You can also see our new hedgehog box, which we will site in a quiet corner of our grounds. This one has an inner wall with an entrance at the end of a passage to protect the hedgehogs from predators. Hopefully it will have a new resident soon.