Island 2000 Trust Blog

Well, it’s 1.30am on Saturday, and it has been a hectic week. We were pleased to welcome Solo, organisers of the Isle of Wight Festival as our first corporate members of Gift to Nature recently. Part of our partnership with the Festival involves us manning a tent with information on Island conservation and in particular our Bees project developed jointly with the Festival. As usual with these things, everything took longer than usual to arrange, printers let us down at the last minute and so on. Then to top things off the weather on Thursday meant vehicles were banned from the festival site in the late afternoon - just as we needed to get all our gear on! A hectic morning followed on Friday, but we managed to get set up in time for things kicking off onsite at 2pm. We had a bit of a soft start on Friday afternoon, but will be pursuing Festival Goers tomorrow (I mean later today) with a vengeance, encouraging them to plant our fabbie bee wicks and part with their cash in pursuit of Bee conservation. Give Bees A Chance.

We’ve teamed up with Biffa and IW Festival and asked artists to decorate 10 bins that will be used as part of the festival this coming weekend. You can see eight of them here, we’ll post pictures of the ninth one, done by Michael Forrest, when we’ve delivered it to the site. The tenth one is the lovely Bee Bin that Aaron Fletcher did which will actually be used as donation bin over the weekend in the Gift to Nature tent. We don’t know where they’ll end up but hopefully they’ll help festival organisers in their efforts to make the festival a more green and litter free place. Dave Badman enlisted help from students at Chale Primary school to do his large bin. After an educational lesson all about waste, recycling and what to do with your rubbish the children designed their own cartoon story based on imaginary festival goer ‘Rocky’, as he says, “Don’t be a litterbug”!

Well, it is now upon us.   The Big Green Picnic kicks off in about two and a half hours.   Island 2000 have been busy preparing all kinds of stuff, from lollipop signs to entrance way arches.  Gift to Nature will be there throughout the day, with an opportunity to see video clips of our work and have a chat with staff about our Friends scheme and the projects it helps bring to life.  Magpie has turned some rubbish into incredible creations which will be on show around the Biffa waste displays.  There will also be some interesting on-street signage, but more of that after the event….   I’m not going to post any images of the amazing creations that will be there, as you should come and see them for yourself.  County Hall  Car Park, Newport from 10-6 Saturday and Sunday.  Oh and there’s lots more interesting stuff from other people too!

Dave Dana, dragonfly recorder extraordinaire, has reported 2 very exciting records from the Gift to Nature pond at the sandown Wetland Walk. He found Hairy Dragonfly Brachytron pratense and Four-spotted Chaser Libellula quadrimaculata, both rather scarce on the Island and the former scarce just about everywhere! This is a great reward for the conservation efforts of the Trust, many volunteers and Southern water who own the site. Here’s one of Dave’s fabulous pictures of the chaser.

We currently have a part time job vacancy and a volunteer position available within the Gift to Nature team. If you would like more details please take a look at the Gift to Nature site where you can download an application pack.

Artists and friends of the ‘Gift to Nature’ scheme will be at Dimbola Lodge Museum at 11am on Sat 8^th March to view a new range of unique and specially commissioned donation boxes for the scheme.

The wooden donation boxes were made by Vestas as part of an ‘Arts & Business’ supported project. These blank boxes were then given to six commissioned artists for them to redesign, decorate and transform into beautiful boxes that would encourage people to donate money to Gift to Nature.

Anne Bodemeaid, Michael Forrest, Gemma Bell, Miranda Amapola, Jeff Dyson and Chris Jenkins have collectively produced a great array of inventive and novel designs. Such was the appeal of the design challenge that a number of other boxes will be on display that have been designed by friends and staff members of Island 2000 Trust too.

The boxes will be on display in the tearoom at Dimbola Lodge for a further week if you would like to go and see them for yourselves. To find out more about the Gift to Nature scheme and how to become a ‘friend’ please visit www.gifttonature.org.uk . After the display the boxes will be put to use and find their way into Island businesses and Tourist Information Centres

We don’t have much to grumble about weather-wise on the Isle of Wight. Sandown Bay is the sunniest place in the UK, winters are mild and life is good. But there is hardly ever any snow. Which leaves us with thousands of children (and adults) deprived of one of life’s finest pleasures - building snowmen. This is such a fundamental of humanity that last year Island 2000’s revered leader, Ian Boyd, decided he had to do something. Sandman Snowman was born. For more on last years event see this post. The event was so successful we repeated it this year, but relocated to Shanklin. While it was rather chilly we had a fantastic sunny day, with around 60 people joining in over a couple of hours. The standard this year was possibly even higher than last years, with some truly stunning contributions. Participants also made generous donations to Gift to Nature, supporting our ongoing conservation work across the Island. More pictures are available on our special Sandman Snowman Flickr pages.

My overdue attempts to make a listening post for the Troll Trail led me to try something new today - blacksmithing. That’s a bit of a grand word for it; all I needed to do was to open out the jagged end of a scaffolding pipe a bit, but it was still a rewarding feeling when the metal squashed out into something more ear-friendly.
My Dad’s wood-burning stove, made from an old Calor Gas bottle, was perfect for heating up the metal until it was red-hot. Then I hit it with the round end of a ball pein hammer while my dad held the glowing pipe and tried to avoid the sparks.

Here it is …a triumph of modern engineering!

Hello everyone - just a reminder that you can so loads more of our stuff (well quite a lot more - we’re gradually bumping it up) by visiting our Flickr sites for arts, Gift to Nature and conservation:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/island2000conservation/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/island2000arts/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gifttonature

I have just returned from a family trip to Frankfurt’s Christmas Market, where we spent much time marvelling at tat from a different culture. I was very taken however with the fantastic painted bird boxes on offer at one stall. I now feel we have done the poor old Grey Wagtails and House Sparrows a dis-service with our 1960-esque concrete carbuncles. I wonder if we may find tiny burned out cars lining the Troll Trail before long, and the better off birds emigrating to Germany where they can buy a stylish pad for a few Euros.