I need just a few seconds of your time....

I need your help ! Can you spare a few minutes to help me out ?

A few weeks I encouraged young naturalists to enter the Cairngorms Nature Young Presenter competition. I entered a video myself, talking about discovering the wildlife near my house - and now I've been shortlisted in the final ten.  Now there is a public vote to find the winner !

What I'd really like you to do....is go to this page and scroll to the bottom where the final ten videos are listed. If you think mine is the best (and I hope you do !) is to click on "Vote" next to my thumbnail. You'll be asked to login to your Facebook account (to make sure more than one person doesn't vote) and then your vote will be added. I really, really hope you can spare a few minutes to help me out - it means a lot to me ! Thanks again !

The best camouflaged animal ever ?

Before I start: I've just flown back in the last few hours from Faclan, the Hebridean Arts Festival in Stornoway. Thank you to everyone who came to my talk at An Lanntair yesterday - it was brilliant to see so many interested faces and sign so many books ! (they completely sold out). Hope to see you again soon !

 This week's post is more of a spot-the-animal. I'd left my trail camera on a roe deer path last week, about a mile west of the badger wood, and among the other things it filmed, I also had a few frames and video that looked like the picture above. Nothing there, I thought, until I looked closer. But actually, there is a quite common but *very* well camouflaged animal there ! It's one that I've only seen myself once. Can you spot it ?

Filming the badgers (video)

This week's blog post is something different - I've put together a video of the badger footage I've filmed since May ! I'm trying out different ways of sharing information, and if this video is popular I'll do more of them in the future. I blogged about how I found the badger sett back in May, and last month I blogged about the shock discovery which brought filming to an end. 

Three other things to quickly tell you:

• If you fancy becoming a nature presenter, and you're aged between 10-16 and live in the UK then you have until Saturday to enter the Cairngorms Nature Your Presenter competition ! You have to put together a 90 second video of you talking to the camera, and it has to include the words: "I would like to present Cairngorms Nature because....". There's more here.
• Next weekend I'm giving a talk in Stornoway at the Faclan Book Festival. It's going to be great, and you can buy tickets here. Hope to see you there !
• In May it was announced that my book had been shortlisted for the Royal Society Young Person's Book Award. The winner out of the shortlist of six will be announced on November 16th at an awards ceremony at the Eden Project in Cornwall. I'll post here who the winner is after it's been announced !

Let me know what you think of the badger video !

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....

Nine things I have learned about predation

One of the longest experiments I have done recently was recording the decomposition and predation of a fresh dead roe deer. I began it back at the start of December, then moved my trail camera away at the end of spring. In between, I recorded hours and hours of videos of what happened to the body as it was left in the wood. For the first month, the answer was not very much - but the next two months made up for that !

One warning at the start: I know a lot of children read this blog, so be prepared that this post shows a lot of images of decomposition. None of them are too bad (well, one is a bit), but just be warned before you click on any videos...

Finding the badgers

For a long time, whenever anyone asked what wildlife lived near me, I always used to say that there were no badgers nearby.  Even though I had often seen badgers dead by the motorway, about 15 miles south of here, I always assumed that there weren't any nearby.

I had asked the local gamekeepers, all of whom denied seeing anything nearby, and I had kept my eyes open but never saw anything even close.  Even after I found the dead badger about a mile from my house, I didn't get much further. It was only in the last few months that I decided to take a closer look...and this is what I found !

A week in the woods

As you'll know if you've been reading my blog for a while, I love my trail camera -  a small but durable wildlife cameras that takes video or stills whenever wildlife go by. I've used mine to film pine marten, roe deer, red deer, as well as what was feeding off a roe deer body. Last year I even blogged about everything I learned about using my trail camera.

It's great to have because it shows a lot of unexpected wildlife. When I broke my leg and couldn't walk far, I used to set myself the challenge of sitting in the woods for an hour and recording what I saw. But what could you see if you sat there for a whole week ? Well, just before I went away over Easter, I set up my trail camera in a new wood - and this is what it filmed.

Who has been eating the roe deer ?

Two weeks ago I blogged about a roe deer carcass which I found in a new red deer wood. I set up my trail camera on the body, expecting to quickly film predators, but by the time I wrote the first blogpost,  hardly anything had come at all, and the body was intact.

Since then, the body has been moved three times, and predation has begun. Of the predators so far, two were expected, one animal I thought would be a predator doesn't seem to be interested, and one other predator has turned up which was a BIG surprise !

Everything I've learned about trail cameras

It's almost a year now that since I bought my first Bushnell trail camera (I bought it with my first book money), and pretty much every night since them it's been out in the woods filming wildlife. It's always exciting going back to it to see what's on it, and it's fun trying to invent new ways to film wildlife. So far I've filmed roe and red deer, foxes, pine marten, squirrels, birds, rabbits,

I'm not an expert, but I've learnt a lot in the last year. I've blogged before about filming my pine marten and red deer herd, but here's pretty much I've learned about using my trail camera from the last year !

Tracking red deer with my trail camera

As you'll know if you follow my blog, I bought a trail camera last year, and since last November I have been tracking a pine marten that lived in a wood on the moors above my house.While I managed to get  some really good footage of him, I seemed to be getting fewer and fewer clips of him, and I wasn't able to track down where he was living either, so at the start of July I decided to try and film something else instead.

Around where I live there are foxes, badgers, stoats, rabbits, roe deer and red squirrels, but I decided to try and film red deer. I thought they might be easy to film because I know where they live, they leave distinct tracks, they tend to move between the same places, and they are very big. So on the 5th July, I moved the camera...and this is what I have discovered since then !

The roe deer of the pine marten wood

I've blogged before about my Bushnell trail camera, which for the last nine months has been filming a nearby wood where a pine marten lives.  Because I have been concentrating on this one, small wood, I've begun to get to know the local wildlife really well, especially with the roe deer who sometimes get filmed on the camera as well. The camera footage is really useful for tracking and identifying the different deer.

Roe deer are one of the most common types of deer here, and are really interesting to watch. Sometimes you see them in large groupings, especially in spring, but they are easier to watch than the red deer, and less aggressive. Here are the roe deer in the group that I have identified, starting with the young fawn I spotted a few weeks ago !

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 !

A roe deer birth and a roe deer death

As you know, almost all my time this year has been spent in two woods on the moor near my village, looking for one very small animal: a pine marten ! I've been quite lucky with the filming, but while I've doing that I've been able to have a close look at the other wildlife that lives around there, like the birds, rabbits and roe deer.

Last weekend I was was away camping with the Scouts, but my dad took my two younger brothers up to move my trail camera which had been left for a week watching an owl perch at the very north end of the wood. He wasn't sure where to reposition the camera, so he walked with my brothers down the the south end of the wood. He couldn't think of anywhere to attach the camera, so he just went up to a random tree, but as he did, he noticed something beside a fallen tree branch that he thought was maybe a dead buzzard or owl.

A month of filming a pine marten

Pine martens are kind of amazing. They are rare, hard to spot, cute, and tough. It never even occurred to be that there might be some nearby, and I only found out about it by using my trail camera (which I wrote about before here).

This is quite a long post, but I thought it was best to talk through all the stages I went through, and all the failures and all the successes. I know there are a lot of naturalists in the UK who would really like to film a pine marten too, so I hope this helps. There are a lot of videos but they are mostly very short. If you love nature, you HAVE to read this post !

Learning how to use my Bushnell trail camera

I spent a lot of time in woods looking for deer and other animals. After I broke my leg earlier this year dad came up with the idea that we could go up to the woods for a hour and just sit and wait to see what animals would come. That got me wondering: what waited for a week what would we see ? Obviously you can't wait in a wood for a week, but you can set up a trail camera (Americans call it a trophy camera, no idea why).

So since then I have wanted a trail cam, and decided it would be the first thing I bought with my book money. It is a small camera that you set up in the countyside and it takes a pic, or shoots videos when it detects movement. I asked on Twitter and people generally said Bushnell trail cams are the best, especially the ones with "invisible" lighting at night. So me and dad looked at prices, but the newer models were quite expensive, and I wasn't sure how often I would use it. So we got a older, used Bushnell 119436C cam, with my first book money. This is how it looks !