Sunlight glows on yellow, white and lilac crocuses.
Welcome to our new Nature Wellbeing Calendar series. Each month, you’ll be treated to 10 easy and enjoyable ways to get your regular dose of nature. How many can you do this month? 🙂
Let nature help you feel better!
Month 2 – February
1. Enjoy the coming of Spring! Get out on a ride, walk or sit by an open window. Think about each of your senses – what can you hear, smell and see? Does the air on your skin feel cold, cool, or a hopeful warm? If you stop for a quiet moment, you will always notice nature around you, more than you thought was there. Make it a habit!
2. Visit York city centre, and take a stroll around its beautiful City Gardens. You’ll be cheered by early spring flower displays of yellow, white and lilac crocuses, pink cyclamen and purple hellebores. Relax into early spring colour with a City Gardens Walk.
3. Can you find a Horse Chestnut tree? It’s another tree that is easier to identify in winter, with spiraling bark up a large trunk, and up-curled branch ends topped by a big sticky bud. Take one glove off and have a feel. 🙂
Trees reflect on a wide expanse of water..
4. Spawn Spot! There are lots of ponds in York, many smaller ones in parks and a few larger ones like the Railway Pond. Can you find clumps of frog spawn or long chains of toad spawn? Spawn only takes a few weeks from hatching to become a frog or toad, so come back regularly to watch them change. Report spawn in the national PondNet Spawn Survey.
5. Do you know your winter wildfowl? Lots of birds come to our country over winter because it is warmer than their own. The Mallards on the water might be ones that are here all year, but they also might have flown in for a holiday! Meet wildfowl on the University of York lakes.
6. February bird cheer! Pause by some trees, look and listen around you. Can you see a small, energetic flash of yellow and blue? Can you hear a long tailed flock whistling to each other, or a bright ‘two note’ song, clear even over traffic? Tell the difference between blue tits, long-tailed tits and great tits.
Two people talk and laugh together in a grassy field.
7. Talk to someone about your favourite things in nature. Or take a moment to just think about them and how they make you feel. Feel your shoulders lower, a smile curve your lips and a happy feeling grow inside you.
8. How about some Moon watching? Look at the moon and imagine it is a complete circle. If the portion showing is on the Left, it’s Leaving. If the portion showing is ‘on the right it’s going to get bright’, a Full Moon is coming! Gaze, and admire the Moon’s glowing beauty with your favourite evening drink. 🙂
9. Bee Happy! Make a bee hotel so that when solitary bees wake up next month and start looking for accommodation your hotel is open! 90% of bees are solitary and live in hollow stems or holes. You can help the declining number of pollinators by giving them somewhere to live.
10. Find a cherry plum tree in blossom. The cherry plum is one of our earliest flowering trees. Its blossom is a delicate white or pink, which develops quickly into a frothy mass, like the best cappuccino! Describe or sketch your ‘blossom moment’ in your Nature Journal when you get home.
White frothy mass of cherry plum blossom glows in the sun.
York Bike Belles 