Did it rain with you last night? I love the smell you get after rain when it has been really dry.
My challenge for you is to do some smell mapping!

Check out my you tube video to see how to do it.

What you will need:
A Map of your garden or local area – check out my You tube video to see how to make one. https://youtu.be/q46ImI1NvoI
Coloured pencils.
Smell Wheel. Download below on my Nature Days blog.
Clipboard.
Your nose!

How you do it:
Take a walk around your garden or local area.
Stop every few meters and have a good smell.
Use the smell wheel to identify which smell you can smell. If the smell is not on the wheel that you can make up your own colour for the new smell. Don’t forget to add it to you maps legend or key.
Then colour that part of the map with that colour. You can walk along and see when the smell stops and colour the whole area or just colour a circle at you sample site. Use your other senses to seek out smell sources. Rub leaves, crush petals, listen for whirring fans, touch and smell textured surfaces.

Once you have completed your smell mapping look at your map and see if you can see any patterns in your data. Is there more man made smells closer to roads or buildings? Is there more natural or man made smells closer to where you live? Can you add a value to the intensity of the smell? What if there was more than one smell, was it hard to distinguish each one? If you had to add lots of new smells to you key then maybe you can create your own smell wheel for your area, remember that this smell wheel was made for urban, built up, areas and the USA.  Can you create your own rural or UK version?
This is a great exercise to do to compare with wind direction to see if there is a relationship between the movement of smell and the wind direction.

There are some great examples of smell maps on this website so you can see how people have created their smell maps so be creative.

http://sensorymaps.blogspot.com/2015/03/smellscape-mapping-marseille.html

I would love to see the smell maps you create so we can get a whole “smellscape” of the Nature Days community.
Please tweet photos #Naturedays @DawnNatureDays or post on the Nature Days facebook page or email me naturedays@reynoldston.com