Our Green School committee have been busy examining the ecosystems and habitats we already have in our school. Mr Keely did some lessons on ecosystems with our GSC and we marked some of these on our habitat map of the school grounds before the Christmas break. These included our log piles, our pond, our trees (especially our hawthorn trees, which are a habitat for over 300 species of insects), our compost heaps, grasslands, to name but a few.
Since returning in March, we have been busy creating habitats we found we were lacking. Our GSC did some work on bats with Ms Baker in October and found they are really misunderstood creatures with lots of benefits to biodiversity- as natural predators of night flying insects, bats help to reduce the need for and cost of chemical control of insects. (And as we know, insecticides are a big negative for biodiversity). All Irish bats are protected by national and international legislation. With this in mind, we thought it would be a good idea to add a nesting box for bats to our school grounds. Declan Free very kindly and expertly created this bat box using recycled wood. We will keeping monitoring it for our nocturnal visitors.
Declan also created a new bug hotel for our school grounds. We think it would “bee” hard to find a fancier dwelling for these lucky bugs! Bee hotels are a magnet for solitary bees, providing a place for leafcutters and mason bees to raise their young. 
The process began with our Green School Committee members filling the new, “bee-autiful” hotel with hollow, dried wood. Many of these were salvaged from our old bug hotel, but some of our 5th class pupils were busy drilling holes to creating some new nesting spots too.
Lastly, whilst many solitary bees will nest in our new bug hotel, we also wanted to create a habitat for mining bees. Mining bees excavate small tunnels in the earth to make their nests.
We began by digging up the earth at the front of the school, formerly our organic garden, where the new classrooms will be built this year. Ms Wood’s 3rd class and the Green Schools Committee were busy shovelling earth and carrying the wheelbarrow over to the location of our earth mound habitat.
Urielle and Ruhin in 5th class then began firming up the clay, before they and members of Mr Ryan’s 3rd class, planted some cornflowers on top of the mound to attract some mining bees this summer.
We hope these new habitats will help make wildlife welcome on our school grounds and aid in our journey towards helping Biodiversity.