Badger behaviour in winter

Meles meles by Freya Y5

Badger 'Meles meles'

Habitat:  Badgers can be found in deciduous woodland, farmland, some urban gardens and coastal cliffs.  So they like to come into our grounds at Wicor Primary as the variety of areas (woodland, pond, orchard, field, scrub) supports their food chain.  

During our research on badgers, we found out that they do not hibernate in the sense that hedgehogs do.  Like many other animals and birds, badgers eat as much as they can during the autumn, laying down a lot of fat under the skin and increasing their weight by up to 6%. This helps them to survive through the winter. They do not hibernate but spend the coldest weather sleeping in their setts, living mainly off their fat.

Badgers are omnivores ( meat and plant eaters): they like to eat frogs, slugs, beetles and wasp grubs with earthworms being their main food, this can be hard to source when the ground is often frozen. . In the autumn we have a lot of food in the grounds for the badgers as they will forage for windfall apples, blackberries and wild cherries among other things.  Coming into the spring badgers also like to eat young rabbits and bluebell bulbs, and we have a lot of the latter.

Winter also plays a part in their breeding season with badgers mating between February and October but the fertilized egg does not start developing until December. This is called delayed implantation. Badgers usually have two to three cubs in a litter, and these are born mid-January to March which is about eight weeks after implantation. Badger cubs stay underground until they are 8 weeks old and at 12 weeks old they start the process of weaning.  

At Wicor we have had badger activity on site for as long as the school has been built here which is over 50 years.  We often see the trails they leave across the site to their setts in a neighbouring undeveloped plot of land, and if you follow the trails you would find three parts of a wire fence which they have pushed up to go between the school field and the field next door.  There is also a hole which has been pushed under a fence into the orchard.   There is an entrance to a sett on the field in a big mound of earth with evidence of scraping around the entrance which we think shows that they are going in and out.  The field next door has a network of at least three setts and we are supporting the community battle to save this undeveloped piece of historic countryside.  We even wrote a letter and went to the Fareham Borough Council at a hearing to appeal - after all we are the next generation and we want green fields not new houses.  But back to the badgers...we regularly find tufts of black and white wiry hair caught on low lying branches and on the fence that divides the school from the field.   We also have badger latrines that appear all over our orchard and we often put our feet in them accidentally while walking through the maze path in the orchard...but we find this really funny.  We think it is really clever that the badgers dig out latrines and this shows how clean they are.  We also found out how to tell the difference between male and female badgers: males can usually be distinguished from females by their broader, more domed heads, fuller cheeks and thicker necks.  The females also have shorter broader ones.

As part of our seasonal learning we will be keeping an eye out to see if any bedding material is pulled out of their sett entrance to air, which badgers do in the winter.

Deadly females

At this time of year there are lots of spiders around our grounds.


When we found a small spun mass we thought was created by a spider, we decided to learn a little more.


This is a cocoon spun by a female spider to protect her eggs. The male spider doesn't stay around for long for fear of being eaten! The spider that has laid this is a common garden spider 'Araneus diadematus'. Her size is approximately 18mm and she will swell up full of eggs before laying them in this cocoon.


She will eat butterflies, wasps and flies but won't eat smaller prey such as greenfly. A baby spider is called a spiderling.


Other common names for her include cross spider, European garden spider and garden orb-web spider.




The eggs look like mini ping pong balls.

Aimee and Abi Year 5

Green tomatoes

Green Tomatoes


Tomatoes come in all shapes and sizes.
Some can be green, some can be lean and some look very mean!

Faye 5C

Green tomatoes can be used to make a lovely chutney, please try our recipe.

Tomato chutney
Makes 4 x 150ml Jars

600g green tomatoes, roughly chopped
1 large red onion,sliced
4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
10ml olive oil
3 teaspoons chilli powder
250g soft brown sugar
300ml white wine vinegar
125g pitted dates, roughly chopped
3 tablespoons salt

Sprinkle the tomatoes with the salt and leave for around an hour. Pour off any excess juice. Put the onions and garlic with the olive oil in a saucepan and soften over a medium heat for about five minutes. Lower the heat, add the chilli powder and sugar and give them a good stir before adding the tomatoes. Pour in the vinegar and stir to ensure the sugar dissolves. Bring the mixture to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and stir in the dates. Simmer for about 40 minutes,stirring regularly and checking that it does not stick to the bottom of the pan. You will be able to see when it is cooked as it will be pulpy and have a hint of runniness. Allow the chutney to cool and then spoon into sterilised jars.

Enjoy!

What we love about Wicor grounds...

Chickens and Bees

"We are just so lucky that we have a wide variety of wildlife in our grounds including chickens and bees. Our chickens are very important to us and we sell their eggs to our local community."
Trinity





Wildlife

"At this school we grow varieties of plants that attract lots of different insects and animals. We also have an expert on plants and animals so we know when to plant the plants and how to work with them."
Jasmyn









Orchards
"I love the fact we have an orchard with 13 different varieties of apple trees. The smell of sweet fresh fruit is really strong in the autumn. When the apples are ready to pick we like to taste, cook and even sell them to our school community."
Eliza


Our allotment
"We are very lucky to have such a wonderful allotment at our school. In our allotments we grow lots of plants all from seed, so we can watch the whole of the cycle in which it grows. Our allotment is full of different types of plants. We love going outside and enjoying our allotment."
Aimee

Tasting the difference at Harfest

Year 5 were given a seasonal feast for the senses at this year's Harfest celebration, using pumpkins we had patiently watched grow from seeds in our allotment.

Our pumpkins

The talented head chef, Fergus Coyle, from Rick Stein's Fistral Beach restaurant in Cornwall arrived to give a demo of pumpkin risotto cooked alfresco in our new coastal garden.

Fergus Coyle explaining the workings of a risotto

We grew and harvested the pumpkin from our allotment. Ingredients for the recipe included arborio rice, mascarpone, sage, pumpkin puree, seeds and saffron which smelt very strong.

Eagerly we watched the cooking which took about half an hour. While this took place we had the chance to ask questions to Seb who is front of house at the Winchester restaurant ( Rick Stein, Winchester ). We learnt that that some Rick Stein's recipes are kept as classics on the menu as they are so popular. Most popular dishes include lobster and steak.

When the risotto was cooked lots of us loved the dish because the flavour of the pumpkin was delicious and the sauce was so nice. We really want to cook this at home after we have carved our pumpkins for Halloween.

Watching and waiting in the coastal garden

Our very own sausage. Part One

4M were given the exciting challenge of producing a 'Wicor' sausage using ingredients sourced from our grounds. Surveys were given to our staff and parents asking what their preferred ingredients are in a sausage. We extended our market research by conducting a sausage survey in Portchester village.

Our local award winning butcher Twell's kindly offered to produce our sausage and we had a chance to actually see him making sausages.The smell was meaty as we looked around the butchers .The machines were huge and weird because they were different to what we would expect them to look like in real life .

The sausage meat went into the top of the machine, the butcher pressed a button the meat shot out in casing in one long tube shape. To make the sausages into the right shape they were knotted by a method called knitting.



Ruby, Ellie      4M

Cool Coastal Garden

Class 5R and guests at the opening of the garden

Two chefs from Rick Stein's came to join us on the day of the opening of our coastal garden. We were excited to see their alfresco cooking demo with a coastal theme, the delicious smell of hake and the peppery Spanish salad filled the air.

To create the dishes they used produce we had grown and harvested ourselves, the onion only being pulled moments before!

While they were cooking knowing we could try it are mouths started to water. When we tried it we all loved it, the mixtures of flavours gave it a great taste.

Fresh salad to accompany the fish

After that, we had Vincent, a landscape architect, who was a key part in the making of the coastal garden, cut the ribbon.

Vincent cuts the ribbon

A much appreciated fish 'n' chip lunch