As a mother of six, Fiona Bird is well versed in the barriers that modern society puts in the way of spending time outdoors with children.
“Our world is filled with stranger-danger rules, which purport to make a child safe,” she says.
“And in an era when the iPad is often more appealing than the park, it can be difficult to encourage kids to get off the couch and go outside.”
Fiona, a foraging expert and former BBC Masterchef finalist, divides her time between Kirriemuir and South Uist, where her husband is a doctor.
Her new book, Let Your Kids Go Wild Outside, is packed with creative ideas to help children of all ages discover nature and enjoy the great outdoors.
I’m spending an afternoon hanging out in the Angus countryside near Littleton of Airlie with Fiona and two young kids from Kirriemuir – nine year old Ellie Towns and her little brother Robbie, who is four.
They’re mega enthusiastic and it’s easy to persuade them to venture outside – to many children, the natural world is full of wonder and excitement.
“Kicking through leaves, splashing in puddles and cooking with foraged ingredients are all tempting,” smiles Fiona, as we stroll through dense woodlands in a mission to find gorse bushes and wild sorrel.
Spying the bright yellow blaze of gorse, Ellie shrieks with excitement. The plan is to pick some flowers, pop them in a basket and take them home, stew them in vinegar and transform them into a natural dye.
Gorse is very prickly so Fiona hands out tweezers to prevent the kids (and me) from getting spiked.
We’re also given lids to shake the flowers free of bugs, which they then view through a magnifying glass.
As they gently put the bugs back into the bush, Fiona flags up the fact there’s a strong conservation message to be learned.
“We leave everything as we found it, and that includes beetles and bugs of all kinds,” she says.
Ellie, who says she wants to be a conservationist when she grows up, shakes her head in agreement and then heads for an old tree stump to search for beasties crawling under a rotten piece of bark.
The next “game” is to find wild sorrel. “Hunt for a tiny white flower,” says Fiona. This is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack but amazingly, eagle-eyed Robbie spots some and gathers it up into the basket.
We also collect pine cones, sheep sorrel and perhaps the highlight – wild garlic.
We smell it before we see it and it’s growing here in abundance.
Handing the kids scissors, Fiona shows them how to cut the leaves from the bottom of the stalks.
Again, these are bundled into our bulging basket to be used to make pesto later.
“The flowers can also be used in salads and you can pickle the buds like capers,” says Fiona.
Back at her kitchen, the kids have great fun cutting off the wild garlic stalks and blitzing up the leaves with pine nuts, oil and Parmesan cheese in a blender to make pesto. The smell is sensational.
They also mix up the sheep sorrel with icing sugar to make a funky kind of sherbet.
“It’s a useful herb to cook with,” says Fiona. “It can also be eaten raw. It tastes sour, but in a Haribo-sour, yummy way.”
It’s been an inspirational afternoon and the kids’ enthusiasm is infectious.
While all of Fiona’s outdoorsy ideas are fun, they are also educational. She teaches safe, respectful and responsible foraging, as well as getting across the message about possible hazards, such as poisonous plants and dreaded ticks, which can cause Lyme disease.
Through outdoor play and exploring the wild comes a desire for knowledge that gives real meaning to the facts of natural science.
Of course, there’s only so much we can do in a couple of hours and the fun changes with the season, too.
While Fiona and her siblings were allowed to take risks back in the day, enjoying a freedom that often presented the unexpected “such as a bull in a field”, she doesn’t advocate allowing kids to put themselves in danger. Rather, she hopes to encourage parents to let their kids “go wild” outside, and enjoy watching them learn and blossom.
Info
Let Your Kids Go Wild Outside is divided into five chapters – Into the Woods, Meadows, Hedgerows and Hills, Seashore, Water and Wetlands, My Wild Garden and Kitchen. It teaches children about their environment, including conservation guidelines and tips on weather forecasting.
It’s packed with exciting projects such as bug hunting, bird watching, star gazing and identifying different leaves, plants, fungi, insects, seaweed and wildlife. www.rylandpeters.com
