Nine great activity ideas for the summer

Summer's here: my school broke up yesterday! (Scottish schools break up before those in the small country to the south of Scotland). I've got a lot of stuff planned for this summer, and I'll blog about those later in the holidays

If you are ever bored and looking for something to do, I have nine great ideas that I'm going to share with you. I have done all of these and they are great fun ways get out with your family during the summer. So here they are....

Six things to do now Springwatch's finished...

Tonight was the last episode of this year's BBC Springwatch. It was an amazing series, as they all are. If you live outside the UK, Springwatch/Autumnwatch/Winterwatch are a live TV series, three times a year broadcast from a nature reserve, featuring incredible filming about all the wildlife you can find here. You might remember I have been on BBC Autunmwatch before with Chris Packham and Winterwatch Unsprung earlier this year with Nick Baker. This year is it's tenth anniversary.

So if you're a parent, and your children has enjoyed Springwatch, and you want to find out more about wildlife, what can you do next ? Here are five simple ideas, based on things I have done and blogged about before. And as a kid, I can say that I enjoyed them all !

"I've found a bone...but what is it ?"

I currently get about 750 emails a year and I try to respond to every single one of them. A lot of the emails I get are people asking "I've found a bone, but what is it ?", asking me to identify bones that they have found but they can't work out what they are from. Sometimes the bones are actually quite simple, but you have to look at them in a certain way to work out what they are.

Over the summer I've been photographing common bones that I find on walks, the sort of thing that I don't look at for long any more because I have others at home, or because I find so many of them. I hope this helps others trying to identify bones they have found !

Dissecting bird pellets

It can be difficult to bones of even quite big animals like foxes or deer, so you might think it's impossible to find really small bones, like those from voles or mice. In fact it's easy if you can find bird pellets and over the spring and summer I collected loads in the woods. Some of them were from walks that dad did alone when I broke my leg like the one with the trapped roe, and others were ones I found myself, like on my one-hour challenge. A good place to look is in pine forests, or at the base of trees at the edges of fields.

I've written about pellets before and at the time I thought owls were the only birds that left them. In fact loads of birds spit them up, like raptors, herons and crows. What happens is that a bird eats its prey but it cant digest the bones or fur which stay in its stomach. Later on it vomits them up so it spits them out with the fur. Anyway, I has a close look at nine pellets and this is what I found....

An hour in the woods

Last Saturday, dad and I got early and went out into a local wood to sit for an hour to see what we could see. It was the first time I had been in the woods since I broke my leg. Even though my cast is off, I am still walking with crutches, and I cannot walk very far at all, but where we sat wasn't too far from the road, even though the wood is quite isolated. I call the wood The Mortuary since that is where I leave dead animals to rot down (the badger and the buzzard are there at the moment).

Most of the wood has mature pine trees with no grass or vegetation on the ground, but at the end where we were there were gaps in the trees, bracken and grass on the floor, and a small pond. A lot of the trees had been blown over in the storms of 2012 which is actually good for some wildlife. The plan was to see how much wildlife I could see in an hour by sitting and being quiet, and was inspired by the current series of BBC Springwatch. Anyway, here's what I saw !

Where can you find animal bones ?

This is one of the things that I have been meaning to do for ages. The question I am most often asked in emails is where do I find all my animal bones ? I don't really have any big secrets. I am lucky where I live because there are lots of animals, and I do lots of walks. Sometimes on the walks I find lots of bones and sometimes I find none. But here are ways to find bones for some of the animals in the UK.

My pile of spare bones in the kitchen

Whenever I come back from a walk, the first room I come into is the kitchen, and this is where the small bones that I bring back end up. The pile grows and grows and grows until Mum goes off on one and I have to tidy them up. At the moment the pile is quite big, so as it's my school holidays at the moment, I went through them to see what I could find. Here is what is there at the moment:

Finding owl pellets

Last week Dad and I went to explore some new woods a few miles from my house. They were so cool we went back exploring there today. We've seen tons of roe deer, loads of roe deer bones and skulls, a fox skull, a real fox, some hares and some grouse. But one of the best things we found looked like this: