The challenge
During Earth week 2019, Peak School will propose to its community to make fauna shelters, as much as possible. The makers will saw, paint, screw and fix on our premises bird-houses, bug-hotels, bat-shelters and so on.
Why fauna-shelters?
The future fauna-shelters are a needed addition to Peak School Wildlife Sanctuary (PSWS), specially on our built patrimony (wall, fence, stairs). Remember old constructions: They were all positive in biodiversity. Sparrows and swallows were able to make their nests on our houses. Owls were welcome in our barns, garages or temples. Bats under our roof were seen as good fortune. Unfortunately, constructions nowadays are negative in biodiversity. They are pushing away life and jeopardizing our common surviving. PSWS will show to its community how to reverse this curse. During Earth Week 2019, we'll place them. During Earth Week 2020, we'll explain how to manage them and the invited fauna.
Why a target of 50 shelters?
50 represents a challenge in building, not in hosting.
- Our lower playground is already hosting a colony of Tree Sparrows. We can offer them 20 nests.
- Our 2 gardens are not using any chemicals. Therefore, gardeners need to prevent the apparition of pests (caterpillars, cochineals, aphids, sucking insects, etc). The best way to achieve this is to invite their predators (tits and Thrush, ladies-fingers, wild bees, earwigs, wasps, etc). To protect our garden, we'll need 5 houses for the thrushes, the same amount for the tits and the insects. We can disseminate more shelters in the rest of our campus.
- For obvious security reasons, we cut and evacuate old branches from the majority of our trees. This being done impeaches the fauna which is using this dead wood as a milieu. Our artificial fauna shelters will try compensate this by offering sheltering to owlets, bats and other insects in need.
- Peak School Wildlife Sanctuary will try to make more fauna-shelters than the quantity cited above to propose them to its community memebers for their own uses.
What are the future use objectives?
A artificial fauna shelter needs to be monitor regularly. Not a problem for our sanctuary but an opportunity. The 50 fauna shelters will mainly be used as a teaching patrimony by our community. The opportunities to learn are infinite: Making and fixing, observations, sharing the data collected on citizen-science database, supporting biology and environmental curriculum, etc.