Walk round your garden, or another garden in the middle of the day. What plant in flower smells the best to you? Does your friend agree or do they like another flower best. Ask members of your family which flower they like the best.

Then try a smell tour of the garden on a warm evening. There may be different flowers to smell. Perhaps one of these will be the new number one favourite.

Remember there can be some really nice smells from plant leaves as well as flowers, especially herbs that your mum uses for cooking like mint, rosemary and thyme.

In early summer, meadows, parks and gardens are in full bloom. Colourful butterflies, damselflies, dragonflies and other insects are crawling and flying about as the temperature goes up. There is colour everywhere!

Choose a colour and see how many things you can find in that colour!

What colour did you pick? How many different items (perhaps flowers and insects) did you find?

Summer is a busy time for bees and you can see them buzzing around in the garden visiting all the flowers. Watch them choose a flower – they can be very picky checking out lots before they decide to stop to feed and collect pollen. Sometimes for a tube-like flower they have to crawl inside until only their bum sticks out: it's always a funny sight!

But can you keep up with one? How many flowers did it visit?

Use the bumblebee ID sheet link and see if you can identify which one you saw.

Butterfly Conservation have a really helpful app for butterfly identification. Why not download the app and give it a go in your garden. Butterflies like a warm sunny day with little wind - best to pick a day like that and try your app out in the middle of the day.

Once you have had a go at identifying one or two species in your garden you may want to try using the iRecord Butterflies app in other places around the village.

You can also learn how to do a butterfly survey by joining the guided Big Butterfly Count surveys at Abbey Fields.

Clouds are one of nature's most consistently visible wonders. They can also tell us a lot about what is going on up in the atmosphere and help us forecast what the weather might do next.

You can learn a lot more about clouds from the Met Office

Or you can just lie back and watch them!

This activity was designed by the RSPB and gives suggestions of what to do.

Why not take a picture or two of your finished bug hotel and post them on the Abbey Fields Facebook page so that we can all see how well you did!

Toads and frogs are a gardener’s best friends – so you may want to help them thrive in your garden.

A toad house for the garden needs a shady location, preferably under a shrub or plant with low-hanging leaves. Make sure there is a source of water nearby. In the absence of a natural water source, sink a small dish into the soil and keep it filled with water at all times.

To make your toad abode you will need an old flower pot, either clay or plastic.

You have two options for setting up a toad house made from a clay pot:

1) lay the pot horizontally on the ground and bury the lower half in the soil. The result is a toad cave.

2) set the pot upside down on a circle of rocks. Make an entryway by removing a couple of rocks.

When using a plastic container, cut an entryway into the plastic and place the container upside down onto the soil. Place a rock on top, or if the container is large enough, sink it down into the soil an inch or two (2.5 to 5 cm.) to keep it in place.

This activity was designed by the Wildlife Trusts and provides instructions for using an old container, like a washing up bowl, to create a mini pond which will attract wildlife. You can then investigate what comes to set up home.

Providing the perfect birdbath can be one of the best things you can do for wildlife in the garden, and one of the most rewarding, too. This activity was designed by the RSPB and gives suggestions of what to do.

Remember to keep your bird bath clean as the water quickly becomes dirty. To minimise the risk of spreading disease leave the birdbath to completely dry out occasionally as this will kill off any pathogens.

Make out of wool and hair from your hair brushes and fur you have brushed from your pets. Natural materials are best: twigs, dried grass or moss, dried leaves and feathers.

See how to do it using a cardboard toilet roll tube as a holder by following this link.

Can you spend one hour watching and recording the birds in your garden or local green space? Based on the format of the RSPB’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch, which takes place at the end of January, you should only record those landing in your garden, not those just flying over.

You can download an ID chart for the most likely birds to see in your garden and in the notes line put the total number of that species that you saw in the hour. You can do this more than once!

Next January you will be ready to take part in the Big Garden Birdwatch along with thousands of others right across the country!

Hedgehogs are out and about at night so you may not have seen them BUT they might be in your garden. The hedgehog is known as ‘the gardener’s friend’ as it will eat slugs, beetles, caterpillars etc., and does no harm, so if you have a garden a hedgehog is to be encouraged.

Things to check for:

• Listening for piggy snuffling noises and rustling of dead leaves after dark.

• You might also hear a hedgehog eating – they are really noisy eaters!

• Keep an eye out for hedgehog poo on your lawn - dark pellets about an inch long or the size of your little finger, bullet-shaped, shiny black containing glittering insect remains.

• Looking for tunnels in the undergrowth of your borders or narrow paths across a patch of long grass which you have left for ‘No Mow May’.

You can also check on this interactive map to see who has recorded hedgehogs in the village – there might be someone near you:

If you find that you have hedgehogs then you can add to the map.

Dragonflies and damselflies lay their eggs under water so the best place to look in your garden is a pond. If you do not have a pond in your garden, you could go to The Green or Long Meadow to try dragonfly spotting.

Damselflies and dragonflies are often seen some distance from water, but you are most likely to spot some if your are by a water body. Even a mini pond can attract damselflies, so it is worth taking a bit of time to look over any pond. Take care while pond watching!

Damselflies are small delicate creatures and when they rest on a leaf or stem they fold their wings along the line of their body. Dragonflies are bigger and more robust. They rest with their wings open.

The British Dragonfly Society have an online identification tool. You can use the filters on their identification tool to find your species. There are some likely suspects: Azure, Blue-tail and Large Red damselflies; and Broad-bodied Chaser, Common Darter, and perhaps Emperor dragonflies.

Take time out and sit quietly outside and just listen for a while. Early morning is often a good time to listen to birds partly because there is less competing noise. Evenings before sunset can also be good.

Maybe it is enough to just enjoy the natural sounds. Or perhaps you want to know which bird is singing.

For many of us, identifying a bird by its song is very difficult. Many songs and calls are similar, and often we don’t have the time to track down what is what. And our memories play tricks when we next hear the exact same call (or was it?).

There are various apps you can download for your phone to assist. One of these called “Merlin” listens to the birds around you and shows real-time suggestions for who’s singing. This free app was developed by The Cornell Lab in partnership with the British Trust for Ornithology. (There is some background here: ). If you download Merlin you want their ‘Sound ID’ and to select the UK pack.

A word of warning: always treat an identification with caution. Some apps are very good, but even the best will regularly mis-identify. Nevertheless, they can provide an excellent starting point in narrowing down an identification.

Would you like to find out what small creatures are crawling around your garden? This activity was designed by the Natural History Museum and provides instructions for:

• making your own pitfall trap with a yogurt pot;

• how, and where best, to install the trap;

• when and how long to leave the trap (usually overnight); and

• how to observe, identify and release your captives safely.

Check to see if you have pipistrelle bats flying across your garden at dusk. If you spot any, can you see the direction they are flying?

To find out more about pipistrelle bats, their life style and habits and what each sounds like, check out our website.

An easy mask to make at home – be a more realistic BATMAN!

This activity was designed by the Bat Conservation Trust and provides templates and instructions for masks of three species of bat present in the UK: common pipistrelle, brown long eared bat, and Daubenton’s bat.

We have limited information on bats around the village (the Brook at The Green is one place where they feed) and for Long Meadow and Croft Close Set-aside, but pipistrelles are definitely present.

To find out more about pipistrelle bats, their life style and habits and what each sounds like, check out our website.

Why not take a picture or two of your finished masks and post them on the Abbey Fields Facebook page so that we can all see how well you did!

This activity was designed by the Wildlife Trusts and provides instructions on how to make a bird saver to put up in a window to help birds spot the window and avoid crashing into it. Young birds learning how to fly sometimes hit windows and the result is injury or death. A simple silhouette of a bird is enough to help them avoid windows.

You can find the instructions here

Try making yourself some natural jewellery from daisies on your lawn. You could make a bracelet, a necklace, or a headband. Daisies like the sun and their flowers close up when it is very cloudy, so choose a sunny day.

Follow these easy steps:

1) Pick some daisies. Make sure that you have quite a long stem.

2) Hold a daisy in your hand

3) With your thumbnail carefully make a slit in the stem about an inch/2 cm below the flower head

4) Pick up another daisy and thread the stem through the slit that you have just made in the first daisy stem

5) Make a slit in the stem of the second daisy and then add another daisy

6) Soon you will have a chain of daisies. The length is up to you depending on what you are making.

Now you can show off your finished daily jewellery!

H&I Eco Fest’s 30 day challenge starts on 10th June. This date happens to be a ‘quarter’ day starting the third quarter (or phase) of a lunar cycle – so 10th June is exactly half way between a full moon and the next new moon - which means that the moon is waining or getting thinner for the next quarter. One lunar cycle lasts almost (but not quite) 30 days so during the challenge you will have the chance to observe a full cycle.

The full moon will be on 3rd July. There are no Blue moons or other quirky names in this cycle. You can find out much more from this website:

You can draw the phases of the moon on your challenge record sheet.

How does that bright yellow flower become a delicate timepiece? Have you ever witnessed the transformation from yellow flower to fluffy white lollipop?

How does that work? Take a photo once or twice a day of a dandelion and observe the change that takes place.

It is an old tradition that you can tell the time by blowing dandelion seeds into the sky. One o’clock. Two o’clock. Three o’clock…..

How accurate is a dandelion clock?

Ospreys, peregrines, owls...and more! Watch wildlife on webcams provided by Wildlife Trusts across the British Isles. Webcams allow an unrivalled view of intriguing behaviours: from courtship, nesting, and hatching to a peep into the first few weeks of a chick's life. Be warned - it's addictive viewing!

Just click on the link and then choose the webcam that you want to watch.

There are 26 kinds of ladybird in the UK. Many species are named after a number of spots. Counting the spots is not always a good way to identify them though, as the number of spots can vary a lot. Not all ladybirds even have spots; some have stripes, patches or streaks!

Have a hunt in your garden and see if you can photograph a ladybird. To identify your ladybird you can use the iRecord app or the Seek app. In both cases you can upload your photograph and the software will try to identify the species for you. You may need to take more photographs from different angles before the software can make a positive identification.

Tip: ladybirds are most noticeable in July so it might be a good idea to try this towards the end of the 30 day challenge period.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes one particular kind of plant or individual flower appears to have attracted an unusual level of insect activity. Perhaps you have seen the effect around a cabbage plant in your veg patch as it is visited by Large white, aka ‘cabbage white’, and Small white butterflies!

However, if you look closely at other flowers you may find lots of tiny insects. Plants with big compound flower heads (like Budleia, yarrow) are worth a good look. Most of these insects are less flighty than butterflies and so a bit easier to photograph.

To identify your insects you can use the iRecord app or the Seek app. In both cases you can upload your photograph and the software will try to identify the species for you. You may need to take more photographs from different angles before the software can make a positive identification.

Enter the Abbey Fields Young Persons’ Photography Competition 2023

We are looking for budding nature photographers in the age ranges: 13 to 16 years, and 12 years and younger. This is advance notice of the competition so that you can start taking pictures right away.

The competition theme is ‘Nature in Miniature’.

Full details of the Terms & Conditions will be on our website shortly.

Young people are of course also welcome to enter the open photography competition to find pictures for the 2024 Abbey Fields Calendar.