The phone rang, nothing whatsoever unusual in that. Susan took the call, I hear, "I'll pass you over to Marjory." Hmm, I wondered, a whispered 'It's Matt' from Susan and I wondered some more, a phone call from Matt usually means he has something up his sleeve! Susan was smiling......it had to be good.....
"I have folk coming next week to do some filming, they'll have a Sea Eagle with them. Would you be interested in having someone bring the eagle in to show him to the children?"
Would we be interested??? I think delighted wouldn't be too strong a word!! What an opportunity for the the children (and lets be honest us too! We stood and grinned at each other like a couple of children ourselves!)
Matt explained that 'when' would have to depend on the weather effects on filming schedules etc. and there was always the possibility that they wouldn't be able to fit us in but that he would phone me the night before, if possible, so that I had some warning. We decided that we would have to hug this to ourselves because if it didn't come off we would have a school full of disappointed children!
Matt phoned on Wednesday evening, they had a spare hour or so the next day, was it suitable? You bet it was! So we arranged for the visit for 9.30 the following morning. This in effect meant that the children had about ten minutes notice of what was to happen....but as usual they rose to the occasion and took it all in their stride. They were all amazed at the sheer size of the bird and once they had got over their initial self-consciousness, were full of questions.
I think they learned quite a bit in the 45 minutes that Mr. Knowles Brown spent with them, telling them all about the eagle, it was fascinating. What lucky people we were, I think there will be very few schools who can say they had a Sea Eagle in their classroom!
These are some of the photographs we took on the day.
(The bird, incidentally, was named Dick!).
Click on thumbnails above to view larger picture
Matt sent me these three photographs which he took while the bird was free to fly, or not, as it chose.
Click here for some of the facts the children learned and wrote about.