Author Archives: Ellie

It’s not easy to keep your students’ attention up when teaching and harder still to inspire interest and passion in a subject: Fraser Rush is very good at both. On the 20th and 21st of November we followed his two day course on bird ID: despite the fact that we were working from pictures of […]

Dr. Christian Taylor came to Lower Sharpham Farm to find a bunch of hopeless students that would have probably picked a good looking/cute but poisonous and deadly mushroom for dinner. We had everything to discover from the kingdom of fungi, since the knowledge of mushrooms has sadly not been passed on from our ancestors, as […]

Halloween has come around (although the shelves in the supermarkets try to tell us it is Christmas already) and soon witches, ghosts and vampires will be populating our planet for this one night of the year. Spiderwebs and bats will be decorating the….. but wait, what is that? Rewind…. Bats… are seen by people as […]

I’m finally in England. On the way to Lower Sharpham Farm, in Devon. Ready to spend my next 5 weeks surrounded by sheep, cows and hens. But on the bus I don’t feel very well, stress starts to rise and a question persists in my head : how will it go ? I arrived at […]

It feels like Christmas. You had to wait for a long time but then the day is there! Finally, you open the lid, press the buttons and wait for the window popping up on your laptop that indicates that it recognizes the SD card you just entered. The camera trap is a present you make […]

Ronja, one of our nature conservation trainees from Germany, reflects on her first week here at Lower Sharpham Farm… Monday, “check-in”-date. You arrive at a farm in the middle of nowhere placed between rolling hills, forests, ferns and sheep. You enter the bunkhouse and there it is: your team for the next 3 months, 11 […]

As summer moved across the country, it was time to conduct the grassland survey on the meadows of Lower Sharpham Farm. In 2011, there was a first study which aimed to record the different plant species which could be found in the fields. Ten quadrats of 1 sqm were investigated in every field to compile […]

From the 18th to the 20th of July 2019, Lower Sharpham Farm welcomed a cohort of pupils from five to eight years old from Dartington CofE primary school. Coming with their teachers and parents to discover the farm, they got the opportunity to participate into a wide range of activities around nature for the morning. […]

Bird Nest Box Survey at Lower Sharpham Farm At Sharpham farm, surveying biodiversity is one of the core activities of the traineeship program that runs throughout the year. The Bird Nest Box Survey is conducted from March to July, and involves the check-up of the 67 nest boxes on a weekly basis during that period. […]

We look after them, we form bonds with them, we exercise with them, we laugh and cry with them…. We have all developed a relationship with the farm’s animals. The iconic animals for our group are without doubt the goats, which have been growing up so fast since we welcomed them while they were babies. […]