“I remember, growing up on the farm, sitting on a hay bale in the sunshine one morning with my dog, and thinking, ‘I’m really happy.’ I must have been about nine or 10, and just being in nature brought such joy to me.”
Meabh Boylan, biodiversity officer with Kildare County Council, has brought her childhood love of nature to bear across her career, with a PhD in zoology focused on ornithology and conservation followed by years working with An Taisce’s education unit and overseeing the biodiversity element of the Green-Schools programme.
She’s thrilled to be participating in Heritage Week’s Wild Child Day, which offers a programme of events across the State that will open your children’s eyes and hearts to the pure joy of the simple things.
She is keen to transmit the passion for nature that she grew up with, enjoying a free-range childhood on a small farm and holiday trips along the canals on the family’s barge. She fondly recalls fishing trips with an uncle and being handed a book on butterflies by her mother to identify the different species in their garden: “My mother was very good at supporting our learning; we were always encouraged to observe and absorb what was happening around us.”
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Boylan is hopeful that, with the goal of having a biodiversity officer on every local authority by 2024 close to being achieved, this year’s Wild Child Day will be a bigger celebration than ever before.
“The focus of it is to bring children out into the landscape and into nature and get them to look at the world in a slightly different way,” she says.
Past events that have encouraged children to interact with nature have included scavenger hunts, nature trails and craft workshops.
“From eco scavenger hunts, nature-based storytelling, seedling planting, wildlife discovery walks – there’s so much that can be done with kids outdoors,” she enthuses. “And art is a really great medium to use to get kids into nature – for example, by drawing butterflies or birds.”
Events for Wild Child day are organised by all sorts of different parties, from community groups to biodiversity action groups within Tidy Towns committees. Fittingly, Boylan describes the nature-focused day as “very much a grassroots thing”.
“We have a lot of very active community groups in Kildare: Sallins, Rathangan, Maynooth, Sallins – they all have different events,” she says.
Boylan is relishing the opportunity to promote the chance to connect with nature all around her home county. She points to the towpaths of the canals as wonderfully safe places for cycling and the rivers Barrow and Liffey as other amenities in the thoroughbred county that are great for families to get out and enjoy. She also recommends Donadea Forest Park, in particular the sections with native trees: “Where there’s native trees growing, there’s just so much more life; you see far more butterflies, far more native birds.”
A not-to-be-missed event this year will see forest school specialist Lucy Bell running activities for children in the woods at Donadea. Forest school activities, which Bell offers through Growing Wild, her environmental education company, range from coppicing – a woodland management technique that goes back to the stone age – and crafting with hazel or willow to tracking wildlife, whittling, making charcoal and crafts from natural materials, foraging, making dens and shelters, storytelling, mud and clay play, identifying flora and fauna, and much more.
Getting the next generation out into nature is the key to fostering an appreciation of the natural world essential to those who will become the stewards of the planet, protecting the environment for future generations to come.
“Kids are being bombarded with this idea that they must protect nature and be sustainable, so on one hand they are worried about nature – but on the other hand, a lot of them don’t really have a connection with it,” says Boylan.
“We cannot protect something we do not love; we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense,” she says, quoting the American author Richard Louv, who introduced the term “nature-deficit disorder” in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods.
Nature-deficit disorder describes the growing gap between children and nature, as humans increasingly live in towns and cities, and spend their time immersed in electronic worlds. The benefits of a strong connection to nature, outlined by Louv in the bestselling book, are many, from boosting mental acuity and creativity to reducing obesity and depression, and from promoting health and wellness to simply having fun.
Events on Wild Child Day make the natural world accessible and fun for children, says Boylan “I don’t want kids to be worried about the environment,” she adds. “What we can do in the longer term to protect the environment is make kids appreciate and have that emotional connection to it.
“That’s the crux of what Wild Child Day is about; bringing kids into nature and letting them be immersed in it, in whatever form that takes at all the various events around the country.”
To learn more about the Biodiversity Officer network see heritagecouncil.ie or to find out more about Growing Wild’s forest school in Co Kildare, taking place on Saturday August 24th for children aged five to 13 years. See the event listing on heritageweek.ie or visit growingwild.ie