Field Course Fun

A few weeks ago I was on my last module of the year, a field course at the National Trust's Malham Tarn. Field courses that I had previously been on were been exhusting! Trying to cram in a huge volume of work into a week is always going to be tough but this time instead of it feeling super stressful the whole week was thoroughly enjoyable!

A view of Malham Tarn

After the 5km walk from the centre of Malham to where we were staying, the large National Trust house, we all arrived a little low in energy. After a short break and food we were split into our project groups which had been decided back in May, and, after discussing what we wanted to do with our supervisor we were allowed to relax.

I worked on bat emergence and following behaviour whilst on the field course which meant that the group I was in had to spend an hour our so out from sunset to count how many bats emerged and at what time. We also looked at if bats emerged closely together and if they did, did they follow each other. Although other projects appeared to be a little more time consuming in terms of data collection, I felt like the huge numbers of midgey bites I obtained made up for it.

In the days we had mini projects that we had to do over the course of the week and it was our choice how we decided to distribute our time. The projects included identifying tree species, observing birds and using coordinates to identify specific flowers. It was the mini tasks which enabled us to really get involved with what we were doing and learn so much more than if we had just been forced to write a report. This was because you were finding out things independently.

Along with all work that we had to do we got to take part in bird and bat netting, allowing us to catch the species and examine them closely which was incredible.

A baby bluetit

The entire field course enabled us to learn so much whilst specialising in things that we found interesting which meant you always put all your effort into the activities. Sadly we didn't get to go caving as the weather was to unpredictable but we did get to take part in a treasure hunt, in which my team came second after a HUGE amount of running around.

On the last day we all had to give our presentations about  our mini projects which was a little daunting but a great experience and then we got to have a fun quiz on pointless information.

Over all this was without doubt the best field course I have gone on so far and would recommend it to anyone at Leeds who is debating going on it!

The field course members