Every winter for the last 11 years, our charity takes out up to 1200 school children around Poole Harbour on School Bird Boats to give young people the opportunity to explore and learn about the fantastic wildlife and local area they live in. All of these children come from local primary schools and join us completely free of charge thanks to sponsorship from local cosmetics company Lush. All trips leave from Poole Quay with Greenslades Pleasure Boats to explore a large part of the harbour and its special habitats for 2 hours, led by our staff and volunteers.

We provide a huge amount of information and learning on topics like bird migration, adaptations, human livelihoods, the SPA (Special Protection Area), and much more so that the children understand and appreciate the local area and wildlife. The children go away being able to identify an Avocet from a Black-tailed Godwit, a Great Black-Backed Gull from a Herring Gull, and a Cormorant from a Shag. They do all of this while keeping a list of everything we saw, contributing to the surveying and protections within the harbour. This is a great learning tool with so many of the pupils taking great interest and going on to find more of a passion for the natural world in their classrooms and homes. 

In recent years, species like White-tailed Eagles, Marsh Harrier and Peregrine Falcon being regular sightings on our School Bird Boats, making nature recovery and species reintroductions a major topic and feature the trips. This would have been unimaginable just a few years ago and is a fantastic experience for young people, demonstrating nature recovery in action for the next generation.

For the duration of our trips, each of the children receives a pair of binoculars to bring them closer to the wildlife that we encounter. After 10 years of running this project, many of our binoculars have become damaged or worn out. We are now hoping to replace all of our school optics with good quality binoculars that are well-suited for young birders, so that every child can have the best experience and opportunity to see great birds on our trips. In the last year, Opticron has already kindly replaced nearly half of the binoculars used in the project free of charge, helping us to reach this goal. We are now looking to replace the remaining old binoculars, by launching a public fundraiser in the run-up to Christmas. We will be donating any of our usable old binoculars to schools for use in their classrooms, lessons and holiday birdwatching kits.

We’d greatly appreciate any support that you can give so that we can continue to run this free school bird boat project, inspiring the next generation of nature conservationists. Thank you!

This winter we will have taken out 19 different schools on 26 separate trips, with almost 1300 children coming on board. Some of the comments we had from last season have included: ‘It was the best trip ever!’, ‘I loved it’, ‘our class birdwatching kit was in high demand for the Easter holiday’ and ‘the children were all extremely inspired’. Many of the schools have gone on to watch the Birds of Poole Harbour Osprey Webcams during school time, another great learning tool for the kids and fantastic for them to follow a local conservation success story.

Photo by Alison Copland