Saving England's most threatened species from extinction
Archive:
5th November 2019
We recently ran a creative workshop as part of our Pine Marten Project to make feeder boxes for Pine Martens at National Trust’s Cragside in Northumberland. What exactly are feeder boxes? They are wooden boxes which can be filled with food, such as peanuts, and installed on a tree. A camera trap can be trained...
Read more10th October 2019
Call out for Sci-Fi/Speculative Poetry and Fiction Inspired by Endangered Species We need YOU to imagine a future for the plants and animals in England! Writing has always helped us to imagine possibilities for ourselves and the world around us. We need your imagination to support two projects saving endangered species: the Willow...
Read more27th September 2019
Wax-zine lyrical about the Shrill Carder Bee I was fortunate to be able to spend one bright Saturday in September on a hilltop in Kent, overlooking Whitstable and the mouth of the Thames Estuary. The sky was a beautiful rich blue and the sun beat down over a swathe of golden grasses, parched by a...
Read more24th September 2019
COLOUR IN THE MARGINS - Ryedale Farm Museum Porcelain Flowers with Sian Hughes This was a rolling activity open to families and adults. On arrival, families were encouraged to research and explore the wild flowers and plants on site accompanied by Lizzie Cooke from Plantlife, and the Creative Activity Journal we had devised and printed. Back...
Read moreOutdoor Art in the Dunes Sarah Jane Richards on Painting in the Dunes........ It was a blustery windy day on Sunday as we met at the st Lukes Church. There was a good mixture of people, a few were regular visitors to the life boat road beach, living locally and walking it regularly, others came...
Read more17th September 2019
One of my favourite things to do is walk in the woods. Another is to write, and a third is to make zines. This project let me do all three, with some brilliant young people and families! We created a zine called Fans of the Forest, celebrating Fineshade Woods and the plants and animals...
Read more29th April 2019
For an insect that spends almost all of its time underground, the Field Cricket has an elusive charisma, on account of its evocative 'song'. A unique event will celebrate this miniature sound-maker... Field Cricket (Gryllus campestris), female nymph. Sussex, UK. April. Photographed under license on white backround in the field. In what is almost...
Read more26th February 2019
Over the last few months, I’ve been working with the Colour in the Margins project to create poems and stories about the plants and animals from arable landscapes which they are working to bring back from the brink of extinction. As the Back From The Brink artist for the North, I could choose any project...
Read more30th January 2019
Chris' sculptural workshops took place last week at a local school in Thetford which sits within the Brecklands area - home to our Shifting Sands project... So that was fun, hectic and very productive! The sessions at the school went really well and the young students were brilliant, very patient and persevered with tricky...
Read moreGiven the microscopic scale of many of these Breckland species, and the difficulty in finding high-resolution images of them, it has me thinking about the thorny issue of the different ways in which we accurately record the natural world. Photography offers a so-called 'realistic' view of particular examples whilst traditional botanical illustrations present the most...
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