Dear Children and Teachers at Greengairs Primary School

Just to let you know that all our bean geese are doing just fine – although I’m sure they must be feeling the cold a wee bit!

I’m off now for the Christmas break, so I’ll be back in touch in the new year.

Until then, I hope you all have a great Christmas, and see you in 2013!

With very  best wishes,

Neville

In the winter bean geese come from Sweden because they think it’s

warmer in Scotland.

This is the best topic ever. We went to Slamannan Primary School

and saw a cannon net going over two plastic geese.

We loved it so much.

In the winter bean geese migrate from Sweden because they think it

is warmer here.

In the summer the bean geese go back to Sweden until winter

that is called migration.

Our project it is about bean geese, it’s great!

We got to go on loads of great trips like Barons Haugh and

Slamannan Primary School . We found out loads of things about

them like they eat grass, when they poo if you break the poo there

will be grass.

Dear children of Greengairs Primary School (aka Bean Goose Science Project ‘Communications Team’!)

I have some good news for you to communicate please!

On Sunday 14 October there was a successful cannon netting event within the field at Luckenburn Farm.  The operation was carried out by Carl Mitchell, Angus Maciver, Larry Griffen, Charlie Howe and a few others.

Three adult males and three juveniles (2 male and 1 female) were caught.  One of the males had 3 goslings with him (dad with three young born this year).  These goslings will stay with their dad for a wee while yet, so we will be following the adventures of a small family, at least for a while until the young start to look after themselves.  The geese were numbered as follows:

adult male (06)

adult male (03)

adult male (07) with three goslings

juvenile male (16)

juvenile female (02) and

juvenile male (08)

4 GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications, is a digital mobile phone technology) tags were fitted that give regular location information (every few hours) via contact through the mobile phone network. These appear to be working fine, although Carl saw one bean goose (07 – the dad!) biting its tag and it has not downloaded for 2 days now. We are hoping that this is because the bird has not been within a decent signal range rather than it having damaged the tag!

I have attached an image showing the point locations of where the bean geese have been on the Slamannan Plateau, to give you an idea of what spatial information we can now receive.

As our Communications Team could you please let the children of Slamannan Primary School know about this major achievement?

The geese that were caught were all given numbers, but we were thinking that this wasn’t very helpful when we talked about them i.e. 07 aka ‘the dad’.  Have you any ideas on how we can solve this?

Many thanks,

Neville

PS Look forward to seeing you all again soon, and thanks for your help!! ;)”

We made our drawings of the geese into puppets. we used them to tell the sky  of  the birds migrating.

After we had been working for a couple of months.

Ann put all our work together and made a film.

I thought it was great watching myself on the big screen in the hall.

We were  looking at clouds so that we could draw and paint them. She was a really helpful art teacher. We were seeing if we could see any birds.

We did a painting of what we saw at the plateau . I was painting the windmills and it was really fun. It was a really big painting we all worked really hard on it and you will see all of this at Slamman plateau.