This is no rehearsal

Most of the stuff we need

The last week has been really busy but now everything's packed up and we're just waiting for the camper-van to arrive before setting off to Wychwood Festival!

Join our BioBlitz and get our
FSC campsite wildlife chart

Emma, Helen, Will, Alexe, Frazer, Hannah and Sarah D. will be there all weekend with fascinating foodwebs, beautiful bees and marvellous microbes. We'll be playing 'Whose poo" and "Magic mushrooms" and have a whole new set of displays and decorations for the stall. 

Our festival "Bioblitz" also starts tomorrow lunchtime, so we hope to see some species 'spots' from the festival site appearing on iSpot next week.

Do you know whose poo this is?

We'll be tweeting live over the weekend, so please follow us or search for #BESfest on Twitter. All being well, we'll post a blow-by-blow account on the blog on Monday - with lots of photos.

Wychwood - here we come!

Perfect Day

The tent!

We couldn't have wished for a better day to do our stall test yesterday: Lashing rain, freezing cold and a strong wind that tested our tent-erecting skills and carried the gazebo (and us) several metres across the lawn until we came to a halt in front of the fire assembly point. Apart from that, and thanks to Frazer's infinite knowledge about gazebos, the set-up went pretty smoothly.

Helen is ready to swab

Once the roof was on and the tent firmly pegged to the ground, the stall was definitely the best place to be and we had everything in place and ready to go within an hour.

Filming 'whose poo'

Sarah & Will love 'whose poo'

We had set up in front of the catering hub on the Open University's main campus, so we had a few visitors despite the weather conditions and the bank holiday weekend ahead. We spent the first 1/2 hour being bossed around by an OU filming crew and doing little bits of 'action' for the camera. The final product should be pretty interesting!

Finally, we were free to wow the trickle of visitors with a live colony of bumblebees, our selection of animal poo and Matt's hand-crafted 'swab-throne'. 

The Associate Dean turned up - claiming to be looking for the Grateful Dead on the main stage - but was very happy to let us swab him (all in the name of science communication, of course), so we'll be posting a picture of the  microbial growth on his agar plate in a couple of days.

All in all, the final shopping list of 'missing kit' is quite short and we're really pleased with how things went. Now all we need to do is find enough space to dry out the tent in time for Wychwood festival next week!

P.S. We've got lots more photos to come, so keep an eye on our new photostream.
Many thanks to Luke Beaman from the Open University's Communications Team for the great group piks!

Happy Roadies!

The Full Bug

We kicked off our day at Imperial Festival with some tentative sunshine, tucked away in the beautiful Queen’s Lawn courtyard of Imperial College London. It was Alumni Reunion day, so there were already a few eager people popping their heads into our tent by 10.30am – a bit earlier than our predicted midday kick off! 

Matt started talking about bees
...and didn't stop!

As this was our first major outing, we brought with us a whole range of games to try, as well as some interesting things to look at and smell. From the infamous 'Whose Poos?' to mushroom sniffing, there was something for everyone. We even brought a hive of live bumblebees, which drew a huge crowd, with everyone wanting to spot the queen. 

Whose poos are these?

As predicted, 'Whose poos?' was a roaring success – we asked people to match the poo to picture of animals, which proved both totally irresistible and surprisingly challenging! It turns out most people have never considered what frog droppings look like before... and lots of people weren’t shy about picking it up. 

Jules in action

Around lunchtime, it started to rain properly, and that was when people REALLY started to pour in. We were also sharing the tent with some iguanas, cockroaches, locusts, giant millipedes, at least two boas, and many more beasties, as well as a man who was making comets, so it started to get a bit crowded. Luckily for us, it dried up quite quickly! 

One of our neighbours

The best part of the day was the amazing selection of questions people asked us. Lots of people were interested in which mushrooms are edible in the UK, why they smell the way they do, and what it’s like to be a bee. My personal favourite question was when someone asked about the insect on our stickers - the ‘roadbug’ on our logo is Anthocoris nemorum – you can tell by its long body. Sarah also explained that the quickest way to tell the difference between a beetle and a bug is the to look at the shape its wings make – if it’s a T shape (like a ladybird) then it’s a beetle, but if it’s an X or a Y, it’s a bug. 

Despite taking place in the middle of London, the first two species records were uploaded onto our iSpot page - many thanks Martin!

Holly with roadbug stickers

After an absolutely fantastic day, lots of hard work from the BES Roadies and a brilliant crowd, we packed up for some well-earned rest. We spoke to over 500 people in a single day at Imperial Festival, so who knows how many people we might have met by September? Our next tour date is Wychwood Festival, so if you’re there, come and say hello!

Holly Rogers - 8 May 2013

Another Imperial Day?

Roll up, roll up! Next Saturday 4th May we'll be wowing the crowds at Imperial Festival on the Imperial College South Kensington Campus in London. 

Ready to go: Some of the stuff we'll
be taking to Imperial Festival on Saturday -
Including wild-flower meadow wellies!

We won't have the full set-up, as we're only there for the day but there'll be plenty to see and do: We'll be demonstrating the magical world of mushroom smells, talking about poo and pollinators and starting our festival bioblitz with a fun introduction to wildflower meadow species. Our bioblitz page is set-up on iSpot and ready to go.

So if you're in London at the weekend, drop in and see what we're up to. There are loads of other cool activities going on during the 2 days of the festival. The full programme is available to download here. And so you know where to go: we'll be in the Activity tent near the entrance off Imperial College Road from 12-6 pm.

See you there!

Sounds of Science

Thanks to the BES Roadies for organising such a brilliant workshop earlier this week run by Science Made Simple (SMS).  We were greeted at Charles Darwin House, London by an eager and excited group of people laying out props which kept us guessing for a good twenty minutes- a washing up bowl, some glycerine, a tube with a plastic glove on the end, a slinky and a polystyrene cup… what on earth had we let ourselves in for? I had just started to worry about being made to ‘perform’ in front of a group of strangers without any caffeine to help me, when David and James from SMS immediately made me feel at ease.

They reassured us that over 75% of the general public were interested in science and trusted scientists almost as much as doctors and clergymen! So we already had a captive audience - they were going to teach us how to tap into it.  The morning kicked off with a ‘speed dating’ exercise.  Here I found out that I had shared interests with most of the people there including my love of real ale, cycling, knitting and being hungover in a boat early in the morning with someone shouting at me. 

What happens when you sit on a balloon?

We soon progressed into small groups and picking some random object out of a bag (and when I say random, I really DO mean random). The aim of this exercise was trying to sell said item, in its original role or not, in a 1-minute advert.  My group rest-assured, managed to market a rather phallic looking orange juicer as a double sided, ahem, pleasure-maker… Other groups were not so filthy but managed to come up with inventive and creative ways to sell e.g. a star on a stick as a sleep inducer, a spiky ball as a productivity enhancer, a fried egg maker as a posh coffee holder, and a rubber glove as an exfoliator.  These performances were all filmed (unfortunately for us) so we could watch and cringe at them later. 

Gingerly sitting down...

...on the world's second largest whoopee cushion

After some excellent tea and biscuits, David went on to introduce us to his street busking science tricks.  There followed the rest of a very active day involving sitting on balloons (bum gets hot), amplifying what a slinky really sounds like when it bounces using a polystyrene cup (like space!), and my personal favourite, sitting on an enormous whoopee cushion to demonstrate how sound is created by vibrations.  We then applied all these inspirational and novel techniques to our own ideas about how to make ecology come to life for people of all ages.  The day finished off with a bit of a brainstorming session between the groups with some potentially brilliant ideas emerging, e.g. people on stilts, a food web/-chain made out of people, an assassins game based on a food web, an ecosystem chair, an insect sorting hat, fungi smells and a bee waggle dance.  The next step is to set out the logistics of these ideas and make them happen!

I learnt a lot from the day such as making as much eye contact with your audience as possible, smiling constantly and open body language.  It also helped to know how simple busks could be whilst remaining fun, effective and memorable.  So here’s to a hopefully hilarious summer with the BES roadies and a little prayer for sunshine!

Testing a few busks

Kate Salmon, 8 April 2013

  

                

Wild Thing

Who better to support our festival BioBlitz than the Field Studies Council? 
The FSC has really pioneered environmental education - over the last 70 years they have given hundreds of thousands of people across the UK the opportunity to learn about the wonders of the natural world. In addition to field classes for school children, professional development and amateur interest courses, the FSC also has a range of great publications. The FSC fold-out charts are a fantastic way to introduce people to species identification, and they have very kindly produced a really lovely pocket-sized fold-out chart of 'Campsite Wildlife' for our Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n Roll stall. 

Sneak preview of the FSC fold-out chart of 'Campsite Wildlife'

All you have to do to get one of these great pocket fold-out charts is participate in our festival BioBlitz - either take a picture of a species you've found on the festival site, or bring it along to the stall.
All collected species will be entered onto an iSpot webpage, so you can go and find more info on 'your' species when you're back at home (and perhaps even win our prize draw - watch this space for details!).

So Happy 70th Birthday FSC - it's a great pleasure to be celebrating with you!

Northern Lights

A big thanks to everyone who participated in our competition! We had a load of really cool competition entries on a wide range of subjects including compost loos, ladybirds' lunch, mating dances and the magic of mushrooms. Now we're really looking forward to the workshop in a few weeks' time.

A special mention goes to the many enthusiastic Ecology students and postdocs from Lancaster Uni, who went for our competition in a big way - quite a few of them will be joining us in London for the workshop on the 8th April. Is there something in particular about Lancashire that stimulates creativity or enthusiasm for Ecology?

In the meantime (and during the recent blog silence), we've been pretty busy. First of all, we're very pleased to add two extra dates to our summer roadshow:

• On the 4th May, we'll be kicking off our epic summer tour in a 'science-friendly environment' at the Imperial Festival in London.
• On the 14th September, we'll be closing the season with a bang at the Butserfest - an alcohol and drug-free festival for young people in East Hampshire.

We've also been designing the stall and our kit. We hope the stall will look something like this:

And you'll be able to spot the festival team from a mile off, because they should all be wearing t-shirts to match:

We're going to set everything up for a test once it's ready, so we hope to have photos soon!