A primary 3 learner and primary 5 learner talk about wildlife and a project to re-create a pond at the school. 

Norah is a bird watcher (and The Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Isle of Eigg Ranger), and she has volunteers come to help her. They came into the school to help us with the pond and also to go down to the little burn next to the school and look at some wildlife.

The school previously had a pond but it failed now. There’s no more water, it dried up so now we are trying to put the pond back together. So we have to dig it out and put a new lining in it, and we have also made a wee path down to it.

We also caught wildlife in this little burn. We caught a dragon fly larva. It might have been something else.

It looked like a massive bug with a stinger on its face. 

Well to me it looked like the tiniest lobster you could ever see.

It did look creepy – like a fly and a lobster crossed together. 

We were catching the wildlife to examine it. To do this we made these little trays just like their natural habitat with stones, water and grassy stuff.

I am really excited about the pond. I’d like to see some toads in there. To work on the pond we went into groups, some dug it out and the others were doing the lining. It’s going to have a deep end and a shallow end so we need to dig some more.

Ponds are important to attract wildlife and keep the ecosystem thriving.

There is one pond with toads in it so we are hoping they will travel over to us.

Yea and newts too because up at the lochs there’s loads of newts, one crawled under my hand once actually.

I held one too, I moved one out of a pond with loads of oil in it into another pond.

I actually saw an otter walking up the burn outside my house last night.

Thanks so much to Norah and all of the SWT volunteers for your ongoing help with the pond, and for leading such an interesting session for us!