Hi everyone, my name is Lorcan McAnulty, I’m 11 years old and I’ll be blogging today as part of the 30 Days Wild ‘McAnulty team’! 30 Days Wild is a brilliant public (well mostly virtual 😉 gathering to celebrate nature and get everyone involved by carrying out random acts of wildness!

My passions are birds and music. My absolute favourite bird is the Long Tailed Tit, mainly because they look very friendly and always look happy( exactly like me). They are very social and like to fly around in groups, tittering away their presences is like magical joy. I like to compose music based on birdsong and sounds from nature too. Sorry about the diversion! Back to 30 Days Wild! For Day One, I’d like to tell you about the work we’ve been doing at our school. 

My school community are really helping to nurture nature in our school grounds. Today (and for the last few weeks), dad, mum, my sister Bláthnaid and myself have been helping to promote biodiversity and ways to help nurture nature. We have made Bug Hotels, planted native wildflowers, planted a butterfly garden which we are working on and put up bird feeders( donated by the community eg us and another pupil! ). 

I really enjoy what our school is doing, it’s making a massive impact on people’s attitudes towards things like appreciating dandelions as important pollinators, not being afraid of insects and waking up their wonder for the natural world.

My school has House Martin nests around the sides but we think a naughty sparrow has decided to infiltrate the poor House Martin’s home! There have been good numbers of House Martins whizzing around our school, so hopefully they have made homes elsewhere. I have been appointed House Martin hero along with Holly (a girl at my school) we are watching, learning and surveying their behaviour.
I think it’s very important  to be wild at school! Teachers are incredibly influential, they shape our ideas just as much as our parents do!  I was really happy that our first day of 30 Days Wild was spent helping our school, our community and our ideas for the future. I really enjoy experiencing the natural world with others, learning to communicate with them the joy of nature and sharing ideas and facts about what we see. Maybe, if you’re a parent reading this, you might like to volunteer at your school or if you’re a pupil you could lobby your school to start something cool for nature there? It’s really easy – it could be a pot of wildflowers, a bucket pond, a bird feeder or like us, a full scale garden with vegetable patch etc! Contact your local Eco Schools authority and see what changes you can make? Good luck!

I hope you enjoyed my blog, my sister Bláthnaid will be writing tomorrow and I can tell you that she has something very funny and interesting planned!

Bye for now

Lorcan!