Tarka Challenge

Hi, I'm Rudi, i'm 8 years old and my favourite book is 'Tarka the Otter' by Henry Williamson. Its about the life of an otter named Tarka and British Wildlife. One night i was reading the book with my dad and i said that i wanted to see all the animals in the book, he said i should do it and call it the Tarka Challenge. My Tarka Challenge started on 1st January 2012. The book contains 89 birds, 54 land based animals, 120 plants and 56 aquatic organisms.

The rules are simple, i must either see each thing myself or photograph it using my trail camera. I will try and see each thing on my local patch (Ogmore River Catchment) but may need to look somewhere else in Britain.

Parc Slip Visitor Centre

The new Parc Slip Visitor Centre (http://www.welshwildlife.org/) was opened this weekend by the First Minister for Wales. Its a great place to see Welsh Wildlife and after your walk you can now buy an ice cream in the cafe.

As part of the opening i was lucky enough to meet the First Minister for Wales, Huw Irranca-Davies MP and one of my heroes Dr Rhys Jones (if you have not seen his T.V. show look here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rsfbs).

As part of the celebrations we went on a Reptile Ramble and saw 6 grass snakes and an adder

Rhys teaching us to love our native reptiles.

Showing us that Adders are cool

I also got the chance to smell grass snake poo which is pretty stinky.

We had a great time, British wildlife is amazing, if you get the chance you should visit too.

Coastal Walk

Sometimes you just have to keep your eyes open when you go for a walk, its amazing what you can see

Some honeycomb from a wild bee hive

Coot parent

Baby Coot

Peacock

Hunting Kestrel

Spider Eats Wasp

Right outside my kitchen window

Wildlife Trust Walk

We went on a walk with our Wildlife Trust Group to look at some plants with a local botanist (plant expert). We saw lots of interesting things and some lovely frogs

Common Frog

Another

And another

Another

And more

This plant is called Butterwort and eats insects

A Glow worm larva

Flowering Bog Bean

A female Orange tip butterfly

A Nursery Web Spider which wouldn't stay still for a photograph.

It was a really interesting morning out and i really enjoyed it.

Yellow

An evening walk round the lanes and everything seemed yellow. The fields and the birds.

Windy Walk

We went for a quick walk down the beach, it was quite windy so we didnt see much but 3 Choughs flew straight over our heads. The cliffs looked really good in the sunshine.

Bloody Nosed Beetle

We have been looking to see one of these for a long time.

Its a Bloody-nosed Beetle, when they are scared they squirt a bloody substance as a defence mechanism. I think this one liked me because he didn't squirt any blood. Find out more - http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/bloody-nosed-beetle

We explored this stream before stopping at the pub for a drink and bag of crisps.

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