Behind the Scenes at Out of the Blue Drill Hall

As a customer of Triodos, the ethical bank, I was delighted today to attend a customer event at Out of the Blue Drill Hall, a community arts venue in Edinburgh.

I've visited the venue a few times before and was eager to take this opportunity to look behind the scenes! Out of the Blue is a large space full of craft studios and offices for small community businesses, charities and creative entrepreneurs. The building was originally a purpose built military drill hall that was converted in 2002 and incorporates a lot of environmental features such as heavy insulation and solar tubes to heat the water. It's a work in progress still, part of the old firing range is currently being converted into a garden! As part of the event we were introduced to some of the tenants in the building including Take One Action Film festival - that aims to inspire audiences to act on issues they've learned about in the films they've just seen; Precious Metals Workshop - a small jewellery workshop with big ambitions and Dance Movement Psychotherapy Scotland a new charity using dance and movement in therapies of all sorts. We also had a delicious meal provided by the Out of the Blue Cafe project, which uses local and organic ingredients wherever possible and offers a training programme for local young people.

It was wonderful to have this opportunity to find out more about a local communty arts project and how one of the banks I entrust my money to uses it to support work in Edinburgh. (If you're in the UK you can find the projects Triodos supports in your locality using this map).

I also had the chance to see the latest photography exhibition from Edinburgh based artist Alastair Cook which is on show at Out the Blue until 24 February and includes beautiful seascapes and experimental photos.

I also posted about this visit on my new professional blog, where I say more about sustainable banking.

As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks that take you to other websites where you can find out more.

New Website goes live!

My new website is now live - you can find it here! It outlines my plans for freelance work in environmental communications and creative workshops. I'll be Tweeting about this work on a new Twitter account here!

Also I'm delighted that the second of my blogposts about Green Books is now up at Brighton Blogger's Book after Book blog, you can read that here.

February in Cammo

It's become one of our seasonal traditions to visit Cammo Country Park in February. The area is just full of snowdrops at this time of year, specially in the Walled Garden. Today was no exception, in fact there seemed to be more snowdrops outside the Walled garden then normal. Just beautiful! (Notice in the first photo the tree that's fallen over and the snowdrops at its base still growing!)

It was a perfect late winter day too with the weather. Well most of the morning! Blue skies, crisp cold air. Then the clouds drew in, the atmosphere changed and suddenly we were in the middle of a blizzard, wild winds and snow that stopped after only a few minutes then it was perfect blue skies again!

It was a great day for birds, the highlights being a tree sparrow (and a flock of what were probably more tree sparrows feeding on a ploughed field, but we couldn't get close enough to see) a yellowhammer (looking particularly bright in the sunshine) a skylark, singing the first skylark song of the year. These are all birds that have declined in numbers quite drastically in the Uk so it's always a particular delight to see them (in fact this is only the second time we've ever seen tree sparrows at all!). We also had an amazing view of a buzzard that was being aggressively mobbed by crows.

Coming Soon!

I've recently been working on a few ideas around offering creative workshops and environmental communications services. I've set up a website, which will go live very soon (once I've bought a domain name).

Updated to add - you can see the new website here!

Recording Birds

I had a lovely birding walk in Musselburgh again today. There were loads of birds about and a lot of courting behaviour going on. The male goldeneyes must get a sore neck from throwing thenr heads back so much! Plus the redshanks were chasing each other like crazy, their little red legs glowing in the sun! In contrast, turnstones, normally a very active bird, usually seen dashing round the beach turning stones, were sitting in a tightly packed group of over 30. The Lagoons were full of two beautiful species of duck - wigeon and teal (and one of the female teal even lifted her wing so I could see the flash of green she keeps hidden underneath there!) . Then on the way back I was delighted to see three snow buntings, I guess they won't be around much longer this year! Lots of other birds too.

As I always do, I made a list of all the birds I saw (26 species in all, bringing my year list up to 69 species!) When I got home I emailed the snow bunting sighting to Birding Lothian (who are interested in sightings of unusual birds in the Lothians). I then filled in my spreadsheet for the Lothian Wildlife Information Centre (who are interested in all wildlife records in the Lothians) and put my records online at Birdtrack (which collates records of birds all across the UK)! It sounds like a lot of work but it doesn't really take long and it offers invaluable information about the state of wildlife in the country.

So if you're in the UK and a keen birdwatcher it's well worth joining Birdtrack and finding out about your local Wildlife Information Centre (or Biological Record Centre as many of them are called) and doing your bit for wildlife recording!

Birds Nobody Loves by James Brush

I was delighted to receive my review copy of Birds Nobody Loves - A book of vultures and grackles by James Brush. It is a beautiful looking book with a striking black and white picture of a grackle on the front. Inside is a selection of excellent poetry about these two types of misunderstood birds along with more black and white illustrations.

The poetry is well observed, here is someone who clearly watches birds carefully and has a way with words to describe them in striking ways. The poems show the more engaging sides of the birds and also comment more directly on people's hatred of them. This latter is particularly captured in the prose poem God Hates Grackles:

They / marched up and down the street outside the capitol / chanting verses from Leviticus about unclean birds.

While in the haibun The Grackle Tree people are shooting grackles out of their tree because their droppings have landed on a car.

But many of these poems are full of the wonder of the birds:

Overhead turkey vultures soar
on steady outstretched wings
folding sky and letting it move
around and over them

from Summer Solstice

This poem captures the wonder of vultires in flight, while the character of the grackle is beautifully rendered in Grackle Ghazal:

I hang for hours on back porches, strumming
old guitars, swapping lies with folksy grackles.

There's also the understanding that vultures have an important role to play in ecology:

Now I understand
vultures too, are beautiful:
they clean our messes.

from Patton's Army

and in Lines Discovered in an Aging Ornithologist's Field Journal, the narrator asks, when he dies, to be left by the highway for the vultures to find him so that he could:

finally fly on dusky wings
outstretched,

buried in the sky.


By the end of this book, I'm sure that grackles and vultures will no longer be birds nobody loves, but birds that fascinate and intrigue!

James Brush blogs at Coyote Mercury, where you can find out how to order a copy of Birds Nobody Loves.

I'm delighted that two of the poems in this book, Good Authority and My Tourist Yard appeared first on Bolts of Silk, you can read them here.

Reviewed for Brighton Blogger's 2012 Reading Challenge.

As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks that take you to other websites where you can find out more.

The sadness of the rhinos

Every day it seems there is news of another rhino being killed somewhere in the world. They are killed for their horns to be used in traditional Chinese medicines or as handles for ornamental daggers. There is no scientific evidence at all that rhino horn has any medicinal properties, but still they are killed.

A good source of information about rhinos and how to help conserve the remaining ones is Save the Rhino International.

Izzy the Rhino is a heartbreaking true story of a rhino. The story is told in children's picture book format, but it is not a children's story at all. You can read it (and weep) here.

As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks that take you to other websites where you can find out more.