Shelter Overnight 🪵🌿 Lydia and her Immersion Year 2 classmates spent two days collecting materials and 2 days building this amazing shelter! The shelter is a Wickiup style and the materials were all carefully selected so that it will last long term 🛖 Some steps involved: - Harvesting high quality long poles - Digging a large pit - Deep hole for fire pit filled with rocks and trench for air flow to fire! - Lashing a tripod and bipod - Maple hoop - Cut poles to length and secure to maple hoop - Weave in vine maple + salmon berry - Collect ferns - Collect more ferns - Never stop collecting ferns.. - Thatch style insertion of ferns (berm base) - Collect material for “bed” (we used hemlock branches, doug fir, and ferns!) - Door (seen in last picture) - Felling trees and processing firewood - The list could go on! The intention was to spend two nights out there but an incoming storm meant that they had to evacuate the first night. Fortunately, they got to spend the second night out there and most were fairly toasty inside! 🔥 The shelter will stay up for the remainder of the school year and they are all eager to spend more nights there ~ Lydia

It’s official! We’ll be running camps again this winter! We love a good old English winter session in the woods, all the mud, the cold makes for more appreciation for the fire!🔥❄️ (maybe even some ⛄️?!) Link in bio! These will be our classic day camp in the woods, fires, games, crafting, exploring, lots to get up to out there! The age range for these are 11-16. However if your child falls under this please let us know. There’s a chance of adding some extra dates in early Jan, and knowing interest will certainly help speed the decision. We already have a few on the list!🙂 Hope to see many of you in December! Message us with any Q’s!🍂 #seekingwild #natureconnection #forestschool #surrey #surreylife #oxted #godstone

This year I (Lydia) have taken a step back from full time teaching to become student in the @wilderness_awareness schools Year 2 Immersion Program! Here are some picture from some of the cool things we’ve been up to! Including: San Juan Marine Ecology Trip 🦭 Camp Craft 🪓 Outdoor cooking 🔥 Large animal processing and hide tanning 🐑 Bird nerding! 🦅 Look out for more updates 🍂 -Lydia-

Few weeks back on a sheepskin tanning workshop with @fern.and.roe Thank you for sharing the ton of knowledge you have in this field! I learnt a lot of new tricks and tips!! Excited to put them to work on the extra hides I have!🐑 Ft Monty the coolest Great Dane ever. #seekingwild #hidetanning #natureconnection

Had a blast a few weeks back at the rabbitstick skills gathering! Went to many awesome workshops with great teachers. Highlight was the pump drill class I took, seen it many times on YouTube but never got round to doing it! Thanks Patrick for your expertise & great class! 🔥🐰🪵 ~ Reece #rabbitstick #seekingwild #bushcraft

Wolf tracking expedition last week 🐾 Beautiful time exploring, looking for tracks, poking at scat, sniffing scat, swimming in alpine lakes, out running a storm from a mountain top!⛈️ A highlight of my summer! Can’t wait to return and explore this landscape more! ~ Reece #seekingwild #forestschool #natureconnection #wildernessawarenessschool #tracking

Super happy to have achieved professional track & sign in western WA! The highest score I’ve ever got on a test!😅 had to get every question right on the eval to get this! I put a lot of dirt time into this and I’m also lucky enough to have some amazing friends and mentors who have taught me so much! Feeling super grateful to be in this place surrounded by awesome peeps who teach me so much! Excited to continue this journey, specialist someday perhaps!….😆🐻🐾🐿️ Also big congrats to Lydia who also took this eval and achieved a level 3! She played it very cool the entire time seemingly not expecting much, and then she smashed it!! @wilderness_awareness @trackercertification #tracking #trackandsign #cybertracker #natureconnection

Amazing weekend with @wilderness_awareness tracking intensive! ☀️🐾🪶 Reece & Lydia are both attending this course, which is a 9month intensive where we meet one weekend a month to explore and learn wildlife track and sign! This weekend we were on the eastside of the cascade mountains, where the sun is often out and you can actually see the horizon! Which is super different from where we live here! (Super gray and wet, like England!😅) Highlight from this weekend was finding this mink, you can’t really tell what it is in the photos! But this fella had been turned inside out and left ontop a rock overlooking the lake! A few theories of who did this were an owl or a bobcat, I’m curious to look into it some more as I had never seen a kill site like that before! Other cool things we saw were skunk tracks, badger digs (the American badger is very different from the European one!), owl pellets, beaver sign and so much more!

Some trail cam captures from Xmas in the UK. These were all the beings I was hoping to capture ! A badger, fox & muntjac! 🦡🦊🦘 All these are in the same place, a sandy hill side very close to a badger set (What a badgers home is called). I’ve been going to this set/hill slide for a good 5/6 years now and have seen these badgers many times now but this is the first time I’ve put up a trail cam there. Surprisingly the animal I captured the most is a muntjac! I knew we had them where I live, I spooked one a few years ago and thought it was a small fox or a huge rabbit….I really had no idea what it could have been!! They are surprisingly small, they hardly reach my knee in height! Getting yourself a trail cam is an awesome way of seeing what moves around us, even just in our back gardens! Capturing a hedgehog would be epic!…or if you fancy the more old school non tech way, you just sit out for hours!…. The two end photos of muntjac are actually in order! I think the camera spooked it!😆👻 #trailcam #ukwildlife #tracking #natureconnection #forestschool #surreyhills #surrey

Winter camps 2023 have come and gone 🍄🐾 It was amazing being back and seeing everyone who could make it! Meeting new faces and seeing old ones, many of whom have been coming to our sessions since 2019! We had a lot of fun, from playing games, learning to use bowdrills (or even just what they are!😅), whittling, meeting new people, having fires, exploring the woodland, looking at animal sign. It’s always surprising how much happens in 6hours!! It’s with excitement that we leave to return to our studies in the US, and with sadness that we don’t get to do this everyday with you all! But until Winter camps 2024…..if you happen to find yourself in the states, myself and Lydia will both be working summer camps for Wilderness awareness school! And if you let us know with enough time we could tell you exactly what camps we are working so your child could be on one with us! There are some awesome camps and I also know that’s quite the distance!🤣 but it’s worth you knowing! So that’s peace out until Winter camps 2024!! We hope to see you all then!!!! Until then, keep an eye out for posts of what we are up too over here, you may need to make us a favourite or like us or whatever it is to make our posts more visible to your feed, as we don’t post often the algorithm doesn’t like us 👾 Reece & Lydia #seekingwild #natureconnection #forestschool #outdoors #play #surrey #surreylife #surreyhills

We are back in the woods for two days this winter break!🎉🎄🦌 22nd December, ages 11-15 *SOLD OUT* 23rd December, ages 7-11 (5spaces) Join us for fires, games and wonders in the woods!🔥 Link in bio. #seekingwild #natureconnection #vitaminn #forestschool #tilburstowhillwoods #godstone #bletchingley #surrey

Xmas sessions 2023!🎅🏼🤶🏼🎄 Super excited to announce we will be back for Christmas again this year and have two sessions lined up! 22nd December & 23rd December This is a quick post to share the news, more details will come very soon but there’s a lot to set up and I want to get the word out asap! One new thing will be, splitting the sessions by age as we know a lot of ‘children’ we know are now fully fledged teens!😆 One session will be for 7-11 and the other will be 11-15! (11yo’s get lucky!) Reach out if you have any Q’s, and know more details will follow shortly! As always newsletter folks will have a short headstart on the booking process!🐾🐿 These are a small handful of some of my favourite photos from the years!🐝 #seekingwild #natureconnection #forestschool #bletchingley #godstone #oxted #surrey #surreylife