Outdoor science at home
The Oxford Trust’s Outdoor Learning and Estates Manager Roger Baker has some suggestions for how you can appreciate outdoor science and nature at home and around your neighbourhood. We hope you enjoy these ideas for fun family activities!
Go outdoors!
There’s nothing like a good walk to immerse you in nature. If appropriately dressed, there are very few occasions when you can’t get outside and experience something wonderful. Build a den, have a picnic, visit a nature reserve, climb a hill. Even if you’re not looking for it, nature will come and find you. And I know it’s a cliché but try and leave only footprints and take only photographs and memories away.
Make a diary
Take some notes of what you see and when. The name of this type of science is Phenology – keeping track of when things appear each year. Do the trees burst into leaf on the same day, week or even month each year? When did you spot the first brimstone butterfly each year, or first hear the call of the cuckoo? At what point do the leaves fall in autumn? The Woodland Trust has a calendar to tell you what to look out for at different times of year so you can record natural events yourself.
Make a weather station
Phenology is closely linked to the weather so maybe you could make a weather station to add to your research. A thermometer, rain gauge and an anemometer (wind speed) and weather vane would make a great project and allow you to start charting the changing seasons. The Met Office has some guidance on setting up your own weather station.
Get classy-fying
Classification is the science of grouping things based on their similarities and differences, and it’s what biologists have been doing for hundreds of years to make sense of the living world. Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) is seen as the father of taxonomy. The conventions he established remain in use today, even with the development of DNA sequencing and barcoding. You can start with an ID guide and work your way up. You’ll find some in our Explorer Backpacks. There are also lots of online and app-based tools, like Seek, to help you develop your own expertise.
Observe the world
One of the most important scientific skills is that of observation. Hone your observational skills when you are outdoors by making some quizzes for your friends and family. Can you get them to work out the odd one out in a selection of leaves or seeds. Play a simple game of eye spy. Close your eyes for a minute and see how many different sounds you can hear and work out what might make them. How many paw prints can you see in the mud on a wet, frosty or snowy day? Some of your observations about plants and animals around you could help scientists too.
Give wildlife a helping hand
You can you make something to help nature out when times are tough, while also increasing your chances of a visit from local wildlife. Butterfly feeders encourage our wonderful diversity of colourful butterflies to your neighbourhood. Bird feeders can be made from fat, nuts and seeds and provide additional nutrition to the birds when food supplies are low. Some mammals will go out of their way for peanuts, although they might wait until darkness. Dog food might prove irresistible for any carnivores. You might be able to work out who has been visiting by looking for evidence on the ground.
Become a natural landlord
No animal will turn down an easy life and if you can make a good habitat for wildlife, it will come to you. Bird and bat boxes make great additions to a house or garden and can be made with some simple tools and supplies. It’s even easier to make a bee or bug hotel which will offer a home to a range of invertebrates.
Adapt your own home
Simple changes to your own back yard or garden can have massive benefits to our native animals. Hedgehog corridors are vital in allowing these nocturnal visitors a route through our urban neighbourhoods. The construction of even a small child friendly pond will entice aquatic and amphibian creatures into your world, while you could encourage the winged pollinators by sewing some wild flowers where you used to have just grass.
Outdoor Art
The outdoors is the perfect setting to get artsy, it doesn’t matter how mucky you get and the materials are all around you. Take inspiration from the likes of Andy Goldsworthy and use leaves as your colourful palate, sticks as your paint brush, stones and clay to form your sculpture or pick up a camera and capture the world around you in two dimensions.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
We need to reduce the amount of resources we use. Where possible, we should reuse things either for the same purpose or in another way, or then recycle as a second-last resort. Can you think of some innovative new ways to lower your impact on the natural world? Make journeys on foot or by bike where you can, limit the amount of packaging you go through, and reuse as many items as you can so that we’re not making more. One great way to help your garden at the same time is to build a compost bin, which not only provides a source of compost from any food waste you have, but it can also provide a great habitat for lots of detritivores – the very creatures that eat the scraps.
Grow something from seed
There are seeds all around us, from the fruit we eat to those that fall through the air or stick to us at certain times of year. Pick a few and see if you can get them to grow. You might need a few pots and some soil, and don’t forget to put them in a sunny place and water them. Do they all survive or are some more successful than others? How quickly do they grow and how are they different from each other? Some vegetables will even regrow from the scraps – try planting carrot tops and see what happens.
Cooking in the countryside
You might need some help with this but can you prepare a feast outdoors? Stick bread is a delicious alternative to campfire smores, but there’s nothing quite like cooking food on an open fire. You need to be very careful when foraging for edible food, but with the right research and advice you might be able to find a whole host of goodies growing in the wild that you can make a meal from.