Led by the Wild: Community Conservation & Environmental Education

Down at Led by the Wild today, Sara and Claire had a fantastic time making colourful potions, carving pumpkins and hunting for broomsticks and scary cats! We also enjoyed a delicious pumpkin soup cooked by one of our homeEd teens.
We would like to thank everyone who came to join us in the woods on such a beautiful and sunny autumn day.

We were blessed with beautiful weather on our Women’s Woodland Days today.
After our beautiful autumnal woodland walk, we enjoyed crumpets over the fire. Our lovely ladies participated in various free-flowing activities, including natural photography, fabric painting, clay modelling, and woodwork.
We feasted on carrot and squash soup for lunch, followed by baked apples with a crumble topping and cream.

Our next Women's Woodland Day is on 17th November. If you would like to join us on the next one, please click on the following link: https://bookwhen.com/led-by-the-wild-events-page

Sadly we have to postpone tomorrow's Women's Woodland Day due to an amber weather warning. If you have booked onto this event, please check your emails for further details 💚🌳🍂

A fantastic day in some very odd warm weather!!!
We started the day helping plant 2000 bulbs in the new Peace Garden in Hythe. It’s just in front of the cafe of Age UK so make sure you pop in at Springtime to enjoy the different types of flowers like Crocus, Daffodils, Snowdrops etc etc!! We shall also be adding our own Yellow Rattle seeds to the area and work closely in collaboration with Hythe Town Council to make this area as beneficial as possible to our pollinators and wildlife.
When we got back we found Mark and Paul Sidders already volunteering their time to creating more chestnut posts for fencing our next project.
Then we planted the Willow whips that Sara sourced that will eventually be our source of Willow for our projects and classes in the future!
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Led by the Wild on the road!! Assisting Hythe Town Council with creating a wildflower area at the Peace Garden!! ❤️

It’s been a busy couple of weeks and our volunteers have been working hard to keep our conservation projects on course.
We’ve also been joined by the talented green woodworker and all round amazing Mark Sidders for the past couple of weeks who has generously given his time, skills and knowledge!
Thank you to everyone for all that you do to keep this special place going!
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Apologies for the lack of updates lately! The weather has been rather challenging causing a few cancellations.
We were joined by Mark Sidders the last two Fridays who is a very skilled and experienced green woodworker. He has built a shave horse for LbtW, this will be used by our staff and visitors who want to try their hand at carving!
Last week we were also joined by Paul and Maison Sidders. Again, extremely knowledgeable in conservation and wildlife management who will be helping us in the future.
Hopefully this Friday will be a little bit sunnier!!
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A HUGE thank you to the 12,000 of you who have already added your voice to our open letter 💚🦋

We are still fighting for butterflies and moths to get the protections needed by the Government to stop declines. We won’t stop until a Nature Emergency has been declared.

Help us reach 20,000 signatures by sharing with friends and family and making so much noise for butterflies that we can’t be ignored! 👇
https://butterfly-conservation.org/emergency

We have many of these on our site! You can build these in any garden at any size!

As the temperatures start to drop our amphibian and reptile friends will be seeking warmer places to hide away. 🐸 🐍

A hibernaculum is a place where an animal seeks refuge and by building one in a sunny spot in your garden you'll be providing the perfect cosy corner and you could soon be welcoming some new friends!

More than 85,000 citizen scientists took part in our this year, submitting 143,241 Counts!

This is equivalent to 35,810 hours, or four years worth of time spent counting, in gardens, parks, school grounds and the countryside. 📆

While the Gatekeeper took the top spot with 190,413 records, the overall results reveal a worrying picture for the majority of our butterfly species.

Due to all our musical shenanigans over the weekend I neglected to update our Friday volunteer day!
Here are a few photos of our Napier friends working in the woodland and in the meadow creating a hibernaculum!
Also Sara and Claire had a busy week!
Here are a few pics, the children enjoyed a range of activities including life size stencils of themselves and using a mixture of natural dyes and paint to express themselves. One little girl was having so much fun she was actually rolling in it 😂
We are now into a new week and our work continues today hosting some pupils from Cornfields School!
More shenanigans are planned so keep us in your watch list!!! ❤️

A big thank you to everyone who came to our Autumn Equinox event last night.
A massive thank you to the performers Kim Thompsett, Alex and Sara of Bedlam Morris and Ken Shapley for the music and story telling.
We look forward to seeing you all again soon.
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The amazing Kim Thompsett !

I love Led by the Wild especially early mornings!

We wanted to give a BIG shout-out to one of our homeEd young people who attends our woodland forest sessions. Arthur is working extremely hard towards several AQA Unit Awards. His latest project has been designing and creating a wooden stool. Once he has finished, he will be awarded an official certificate by the AQA Unit Award Scheme.