Tikumu’s letter

Press, 11 April 1978, Page 18

Tikumu’s letter

Dear Children, This month you will notice changes in the parks and gardens. Many trees are bright with leaves and berries, and bear nuts and cones. Fruit falls to the ground and leaves whirl, like confetti, in the wind.

You can make lovely collage pictures out of bark, grass, wild flowers, and leaves, and you can have fun collecting nuts for all sorts of games. There are other changes in April. Go outside and look around quietly. You might see a hedgehog building a snug nest where he can hibernate all winter. You might pick up some dead insects, killed by the sharp cold. You might discover a moth resting inside the folds of a curtain, and a ladybird behind the bark

of a tree. But you will not fin 1 ants. They burrow deep down into the earth to keep warm. You might see tuis, wood pigeons, and silvereyes eating the fat berries. You might spy a toadstool, gay with spotted dots, but poisonous to eat. And everywhere you will see seeds — on dead flower heads, on the ground, tangled in animals’ fur. There are seeds in the beaks of birds but maybe you will not spot those. And there are seeds flying about in the wind — tiny seeds and big seeds. Birds carry them and the wind tosses them to far away places and near ones. And some of them fall on soil and grow into new plants. I hope you have happy Autumn days,