Happy Volunteers' Week

Mary shares her experience volunteering with five organisations and charities...

A photo of Mary, a volunteer wearing a yellow hard hat and using a post basher to hammer a post into the ground

It’s early March and I’ve arrived a few minutes early for the work party. I get my boots on, check I’ve got my gloves, then stop - I can hear a skylark singing. As everyone else arrives we all pause to enjoy watching the small bird rise and descend. Finally, spring is here!

We chat as we collect tools from the vehicle – someone’s car has started making a funny noise but a volunteer who is a retired mechanic can advise. You meet people of all ages and walks of life, drawn together by a shared love of being outside and the natural world.

Since giving up full time work, I now volunteer with five organisations and charities all working for the same objectives: to actively manage the local landscape, to gather knowledge and information and to help people gain understanding and enjoyment of the natural world.

The Wyre Community Land Trust (WCLT) is local to Wyre Forest and based on the ideas of John Ruskin (the 19^th century polymath and early environmentalist). Amongst several other activities, we run the herd of conservation grazing cattle – little black Dexters that you might come across in the forest. I love working with the cows and by understanding their body language, mood and herd hierarchy, we can generally get them to move around without fuss and aggravation. Recently, we walked a couple of them a quarter of a mile through the forest calmly and relaxed; us, enjoying the spring sunshine and they, enjoying a snack of fresh bramble along the way.

From working with cows, I’ve learnt the most important rule of volunteering - ‘never be parted from your lunch’ - sometimes jobs just take that bit longer than you thought they would!

Over the last 15 years I’ve seen the real difference the cattle have made to the sites they graze. Pound Green (a Trust site) is now much more open, returning to how it looked in the early Pathé news film The Home Wrecker (the first time a cuckoo was filmed laying eggs in another bird’s nest). Us ‘vols’ from both WWT and WCLT have worked together removing scrub and raking up bracken after the traditional horse-powered roller has been through. So far, the cuckoos are yet to return but the volunteers who record butterflies and reptiles are reporting progress.

I help with the annual deer count at Pound Green and adjacent Forestry England land. Whilst getting up at 5.15am is a chore, by 6am when you are onsite, the dawn mist is rising, a song thrush is singing its heart out and then twelve fallow deer step quietly into view. I’m left wondering why I don’t do it more often.

Wildlife doesn’t follow the same boundaries as organisations so, by volunteering with different organisations, I get to work in similar habitats that are being managed in subtly different ways to suit the differences in terrain, access and resources; I enjoy the contrast of weekend brash burning (Forestry England) with learning the skill of hedge-laying (Natural England).

A photo of volunteer Mary with her hand inside a large wooden compost bin in the garden at Lower Smite Farm

As a retired nurse and teaching assistant, I’ve always volunteered to help with groups of children and young people either through formal visits to Lower Smite Farm and other nature reserves or informally at open days and with Cub/Brownie pack meetings and the like. Over at National Trust’s Kinver Edge, I helping with visiting school groups. The children are so excited, they cannot believe how tall the trees are - and then after the first 50 yards they are definitely climbing a mountain. They go home asking if they can come again, so excited by the day.

Kinver Edge is a corner of what, to me, is the most exciting habitat in Worcestershire: lowland acid heathland, which most people, including me until 16 years ago, have never heard of. The Trust’s Dropping Well Farm and The Devil’s Spittleful are other examples. Fantastic for biodiversity, not bad at carbon capture, rarer than the Amazon rainforest and, as other volunteers’ efforts have shown, rich in heritage and history. And it’s right on our doorstep. Yes, it is under pressure but by extending my education role with the Trust at Dropping Well Farm, I’ve been able to spread the message that fantastic wildlife dramas are happening right on our doorstep - we don’t have to save up for Costa Rica.

I might be moving cows, getting up before dawn to look for deer, putting together an information poster, helping at an event, planting trees, clearing scrub, fixing a gate or simply sitting with my back against a tree enjoying the birdsong. Along the way I’ve picked up many practical skills and become almost, but not quite, impervious to mud and rain - although in the relentless rain last winter I did occasionally question my life choices!

A photo of four garden volunteers standing in front of the flower border at Lower Smite Farm on a path with a gate behind them

We moved from Devon to Worcestershire around 30 years ago, in comparison there didn’t seem to be as much nature here but through volunteering I have discovered that Worcestershire has some very exciting wildlife. To be fair, many key species are quite small but they need looking after and are right on our doorstep – for example, those mini volcanoes of earth that sprung up in the spring garden are ashy mining bee nests.

Our wildlife is under pressure from us humans. We have taken it for granted, assuming it will look after itself. Plants and animals will do their best to survive but not all will make it. And we will be poorer as a result.

No matter what your level of interest, fitness, available time, your local nature-based organisation has a role for you. For me the natural world has brought me physical and mental health, knowledge and, most of all, friendship.