I realised that any successful counting was going to require a narrowing of the field. On the grounds that the birds were overwhelming I decided to concentrate my efforts on bees as these are something of a pet subject at the moment.  I failed to inform Goldilocks of my new strategy and every so often my efforts were interrupted by shrieks of, ‘Wagtail! Wagtail!’  

I think I may have counted the same carder bee (little burnt orangey ones) five times.  I thought I’d had more luck when six honey bees simultaneously landed on the patch of forget-me-nots outside the kitchen window, only to concede later with my ‘Collins British Wildlife’ in hand,  that my certain six honey bees may possibly have been only six drone flies.  I lost count of the buff-tail bumble bees, which I guess is a good thing, but the survey form doesn’t have a field for ‘estimate of all things buzzy’.   There were ‘quite a few’ (handy scientific term!) hover flies, which I identified mostly from the fact they were hovering, the minute you try to get near them they do this amazing warp speed getaway manoeuvre.   I  think that,  Winnie-ther-Pooh style, I will have to disguise myself as a raincloud in order to get close.  The Man from Salford thinks I will have no problem passing myself off as a rain cloud.

A more successful Easter activity was a visit to Trentham Gardens.  Goldilocks and her pals threw themselves around the adventure playground and then set forth on the ‘Bar Fuss’ or barefoot walk.  Boots and socks off, we bravely ventured through shin-deep mud, cold water, gravel, cobbles, bark-chip, sand and hay.  I couldn’t help feeling that I could have done something pretty similar walking home up the towpath for free.  Goldilocks claims that she is now desensitised to any surface and does not need shoes.  Great, I tell her, we will  lessen our global footprints by not buying any more new shoes and she looks more than a little crestfallen. 

We also visited Trentham’s eco-garden and came away with the idea of a ‘fedge’ for a child-friendly weekend garden project. 

Here is our fedge.  To the untrained eye it might look like something Eeyore knocked together, but hopefully to the multiple eyes of insects this is the Hilton.  We have stuffed our fedge with leaf-litter, reeds, pine cones, sticks and what I hope are some very dead Japanese knotweed stems.  These hollow stems are five-star accomodation for carder bees apparently.  I guess these structures can be as fancy or as simple as you like and I’m sure people more creative than us could come up with a more impressive fedge.   The project kept Goldilocks happily employed for a couple of hours, running to and forth with her finds and then trying to make them all stick together somehow. (Tip-use plenty of soft materials in between the sticks – leaves, conifer branches and reeds all seem to have good binding properties.)  We finished off by planting a couple of foxgloves  and sowing wild flower seeds at the base of our fedge in order to ‘advertise our vacancies’ to the insect world.  A passer-by admired our handy work and then inquired as to when we were intending to set fire to it!

We have traffic outside our house!  There has been the odd boat before now this spring, but the Easter holiday is when the canal really comes alive with boats and our sense of isolation, for a few months at least, disappears.  It also reminds me that we are not living simply in a rural idyll but that we are at the very heart of Britain’s, indeed Europe’s, earliest industrial beginnings.   This canal was built specifically to carry raw materials for the pottery industry.

These days it is all about leisure and most of the boats are kitted out more luxuriously than our house.  Despite rising costs of running boats, it still seems to be a popular holiday choice and I imagine still uses less fuel than jetting off in a plane.  We get the occasional steam powered boat coming by, but never one towed by a horse, which would have been the original green option.  (And a free source of manure for our garden.)  But being the soppy sort of person who still cries at Black Beauty, I can’t really say I’d like to see the horse returned to the era of gruelling burden.

As Willow and I trotted up the towpath this morning for our walk, I was delighted to come across this larger-than-usual patch of coltsfoot.  I like the traditional folk names for plants, and looking at the elegantly poised ‘hooves’ of the spent flowers you can see where the name came from.  Other common names are horsehoof, foalsfoot, coughwort and English tobacco.  The botanical name Tussilago Farfara, means cough dispeller.  The Greek physician Dioscorides recommended smoking the herb to relieve coughs and to this day herbalists use it to treat bronchial conditions, laryngitis and asthma.  It is apparently still used as an ingredient in herbal cigarettes.  There is need for some caution, however, as it contains alkaloids that are possibly damaging to the liver.  If you are anything less than an expert it’s best to leave well alone.

Canals, whether urban or rural, are the green corridors of England. They are relatively undisturbed by cultivation and, lined with hedgerow, they provide  a haven for English wildlife.  If you are out on the canals this Spring and Summer, be it walking, boating or fishing, you might like to join in the wildlife survey being carried out by www.waterscape.com this year and provide valuable data to ensure our canals continue to be an oasis for wildlife.  Good luck to you, as I write the skies have turned black and as they say around these parts, they’re giving out rain this weekend.