This week’s nature connectedness highlight was undoubtedly the day spent at Rydal Academy in Darlington delivering a Science Week activity to their whole Year 4 cohort – nearly 90 children.  I used the excellent OPAL resources from Imperial College’s ‘Bug Hunt’ to explain the characteristics of the main groups of invertebrates the children might expect to find and then set them loose (not all at the same time!) to explore what they could find in different types of habitats in the school’s nature garden.  The children’s enthusiasm and excitement was infectious, despite Tuesday being dreary at best, and they found millipedes, centipedes, snails and earthworms as well as dozens of slugs and woodlice.  It was good to be able to talk to them a little about how much more they found in natural habitats rather than on man-made surfaces, and why this is important.  Maybe the best thing of all was hearing one of the class teachers promise to take the children out a little later in the year, on a dry day, when there was more chance of them finding flying insects too – job done, I felt!

This week has also marked the welcome return of waking up to daylight when I want to go for an early run.  It is so easy to be down at the rowing club for 7.45am on a bright, sunny, Saturday morning than it is in winter. The vernal equinox, when darkness and light last for equal parts of the day, is almost on us and the birds are in full voice everywhere I go.  The Long-tailed tits have been back in the garden, Skylarks and Lapwing are competing for my attention in the fields as I cycle to work and Coal tits, Blue tits and Great tits take over as I walk up Cardiac Hill. The birding highlight of the week, though, was seeing as well as hearing a Curlew overhead as I ran up to Old Quarrington one morning – I hear them reasonably often, but this was the first time I’d seen one locally.

The plants know it’s spring too; Bitter-cress is flowering at the pavement edges and Danish Scurvy-grass (Cochlearia danica) along main roads where salt has been spread over winter. Scurvy grass is a coastal plant, a naturally salt-tolerant halophyte, so its progress inland from its original coastal habitat is clearly opportunistic! The smell of new-mown grass from the road verge as I cycled home one evening was a taste of things to come but not entirely welcome, given campaigns by Plantlife and other charities to get verges cut much less frequently, so they can act as refuges for wild plants and animals. I can’t see of any conceivable reason for cutting verges when the grass has barely started to grow. This week I’ve also seen my first Coltsfoot and Greater Stitchwort of the year, though I have no photos of either as I was running at the time!

There are plenty of Wood Anemones in flower now on Cardiac Hill, tracking the sun each day to make the most of the spring sunlight for growth and reproduction, before the trees get their leaves.   I was more surprised to spot an enormous Deer Mushroom, Pluteus cervinus, poking up through last year’s leaf litter – the fruiting body more often emerges in autumn, like that of many other fungi. My attempts to identify it were watched without concern by a grey squirrel perched on the fork of a nearby Elder tree, munching away on a nut.

Some of the frogspawn in the pond has have hatched into tadpoles now; the jelly-like sacks are empty and tiny tadpoles cluster around them. To start with the tadpoles don’t have mouths and remain dependent on the remains of their egg yolk but, once they develop mouths with rasping teeth, they graze on the film of bacteria and algae growing on the surface of the disintegrating jelly – a truly multipurpose source of nutrition.  I can also see the tadpoles’ feathery external gills. I’ve not seen the adult frogs yet this year but often hear a splash as they jump into the water on my approach.  What I have seen is plenty of large Water Boatmen, though they also tend to dive when I approach.

In the garden there are blue Anemone blanda and the first of our daffodils are in flower, alongside the forsythia. I did stop and buy seed potatoes and broad bean seeds at the garden centre on the way to Kirkcudbright, so there is really no excuse for not getting started in the allotment in any spare time I have before we go to China!

My culinary and cultural highlights this week were both on Saturday evening – superior vegan pub grub in the shape of battered and deep-fried tofu wrapped in seaweed sheets at the Ship Inn in Ouseburn, followed by our first post-Covid gig in the Cluny – the excellent Marika Hackman.