Diary Entry - February 

The bird boxes and feeders are now up, and we have had a site visit from the Northward Hill and Cliffe Marshes. RSPB warden.

The better weather has encouraged more walks and the quadratting is continuing with students recording what they find by drawing and camera. On a combined which with the Art Department again, students were thrilled to see three green woodpeckers flying together.

We have a conducted a more complete audit of species in the area, which include: kestrels, owls, redwings, fieldfare and at least one greater spotted woodpecker. Thirty-one species have been seen some of which pupils and staff had never heard of! We have begun searching for owl pellets and our male fox has been marking his territory. We had a lessons on food chains from all of this work.

We saw some tree fellers, pruning the bushes and sawing down a damaged tree and asked for a slice of tree to give to Mike, our technician. The chain saw cut off a strange-looking slice of the tree-possibly from higher up the trunk. The tree, a copper beech was being recycled into wood chip.

We looked at the huge base of the tree where the rings showed how old it was. The students were amazed at what he saw: ‘It’s so diseased -The whole of the middle is gone, so the tree would not stand up.’

‘There is such a thing as a tree dying when it has a disease.’

It was not just a slice of tree for Mike to take back but a slice of real life!

In February we started to study climate change and did a geographical survey of where we were from some of our favourite sites for school visits, like Chessington World of Adventure, Sevenoaks Riding and Thorpe Park, measuring the miles involved and recording the results.

We contacted The Met Office for help in setting up the weather centre and compared old, hand made ways with new methods of measurement, such as the computer. The new systems were finally up by the end of the month.

We had a lot of help from The Met Office about climate and worked out a project using two methods of measuring possible climate change using old and new ways. The first used the ‘Delphic Method’. The second using graphs and mathematics and probability. This is to be measured next month. We are planning to send the scheme to The Met Office for their consideration.

The plan is to arrive at a possible date by which global average temperature will rise by three degrees Celsius. The starting date is 1980, using known data. The school will also have its own survey of staff and children. This required a lot of research by the team. We discovered that Britain’s weather has been measured by climatologists since at least 1700 and accurately since 1840.

Back to main school page