What a super feeling to be outside and working with nature, on Sunday with Bolton NEWT. Our event involved continuing to clear a wetland area of crack willow so that more light could get to the pond and encourage more diverse wildlife t flourish. Spending the day out in the open with a purpose stimulates all senses and really brings mind and body together. Senses:
The sound of the wood being cut down and the birds in the trees (and the odd drone flying by);
The sight of the plants, birds, sky, clouds and sun
The feeling of your muscles straining as you drag pieces of wood out of the pond
The smell of the undergrowth and trees
The taste of whatever floats on the wind (I'll leave that to your imagination!)
And then there is a sense of community, doing something together for the local community around Leverhulme park. Chatting to people as they walk past with their dogs. David Hyne's popped by to see us. Nice to meet you David! He has recently been posting photographs on our site of insects he finds on Darcy Lever Gravel pits and beautiful photographs they are. Here are a couple:
Apart from wellbeing, being out and about with nature develops one's naturalistic intelligence. This 'intelligence' was proposed by Howard Gardiner as one of the 8 'intelligences', others being visual, logical, musical, auditory etc. Exploring your naturalistic intelligence encourages:
Attribute Orientation – the ability to find common traits or commonalities among things, items, or arrays
Categorization – the ability to identify categories by attribute or characteristic
Hierarchical Reasoning – the ability to rank or order items by significance or relationship
Schematic Memory – the ability to internalize and recall information by attribute category or hierarchical classification
Natural orientation – the ability to identify with living organisms and their environments (this ability can offer changed or unique perspectives or encourage empathetic understanding)
These are all fantastic attributes to explore and nurture in the modern world. If you'd like to read more about it, there is a short summary here: http://thesecondprinciple.com/optimal-learning/naturalistic-intelligence/
Simon found a robin after some grubs, from where we had chopped down the willow.......
With all of the chopped down willow, we made a dead hedge. This will be a real feature to view from outside the pond and also adds some definition to its edge.
This was the result at the end of the day - extremely satisfying and definitely a cracking work out!
Chris's fab video to summarise the event:
Do come along to out next event not September 10th 2017.