Literally London

One of the rewards of being a speaker are the questions that interested listeners ask at the end of a talk or workshop. The church group that I met recently was especially well informed and their questions were perceptive and probing. My statement that I would be travelling to London after the lunchtime session to attend the launch of the Cheltenham Literature festival prompted the response – Why London and why the festival? Good questions, thoughtfully placed by a polite sceptic.

I met my colleague Emma, who had the bright idea of linking with the festival, at the launch party. She was already deep in conversation with a member of the festival launch team. The reason that the Cheltenham Literature Festival was launched at the London Library in St James’ Square was quite simple. The majority of literary folk and media promoters are based in London and a reception there is much better attended than one at the Pump Rooms. Writers, publishers and publicists are all happy to visit Cheltenham for their respective events, but not for canapés and speeches.

The trip was well worth it for us. We did not go just to mix with Barry Norman, Claire Short, June Bakewell or Kate Aidey, we particularly wanted to meet the managing team and speak with them about our Manty Don event in October.

The Chairman of the festival, Sir Michael McWilliam KCMG, was particularly interesting and interested. He understood very well that one of the big challenges for nature conservation charities like the Trust is to explain its work to the widest audience. He fully understood that our interest in the Literature Festival is that nature has been a theme within the Arts for millennia. Art lovers are a natural audience for the message and by supporting Monty Don, a passionate enthusiastic for plants and wildlife, the Trust will benefit from his personal commitment and networks.

Train services from London to Gloucestershire in the evenings are poor and Emma and I had to leave the event early for Paddington station. Always the good leader, Emma made sure that her support team back at the office did not miss out on one of the goody bags. Frankie and Alice, who will be working with Monty Don at his talk on October 17th were very happy not to have been forgotten Cinderellas!

Electric Blue

The electric-blue flash of a Kingfisher on the River Cam this morning made my walk with Millie the Labrador special and suggested that this might be a special day.

It is not yet 3:00pm but things are going well. I have finished a successful talk to the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network at our centre at Robinswood Hill and I am waiting to make a journey to the official opening of the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

My first meeting of the day was a really pleasant catch-up session with Richard Skeehens, MD of Grundon Waste, and Ruth Roll of RR Environmental Communications Ltd. We have not met for a number of months and an update on the biodiversity work that the Trust has been able to compete with Landfill Community Fund donations from Grundon was very timely.

Grants and donations are the route by which the Trust is able to supplement the generous contributions that our members make to run the Trust and enable it to carry our novel conservation work in the county. Grundon have been extremely generous since the inception of the Landfill Tax scheme in around 1993.

The current total that Grundon has given the Trust to spend on its work is a massive £1.3 million! These donations have transformed the Trust’s ambition and capacity and enabled it to plan further ahead, in reasonable confidence of success.

Planning for 2010 is well underway and the continuing support of Grundon is enabling us to design a major new conservation campaign. The electric blue Kingfisher is a good symbol of the new work that will be started next April. I am not a believer in synchronicity, but sometimes I wonder if chance is more than a statistical function.

Kingfisher (c) Kenny Crook

Arvicola terrestris – The Water Vole

An important part of ensuring that the Wildlife Trust runs smoothly is the care that is taken of the staff and volunteers who drive our business of conservation.

Each month a simple questionnaire is whizzed around on email so that individuals can comment on how things are going. This time my colleague Elaine asked us all to give any reasons we have for enjoying working with the Trust. My two most important statements (excluding the strong birthday cake culture that we have!) are those of ‘enjoying the work’ and ‘achieving conservation results’.

Our current focus for conservation programmes is the lovely little Water Vole. This creature is an icon of what conservation is all about. It is harmless, does not damage river banks or nearby crops, does not carry any serious diseases and the chance of this small vegetarian harming livestock is remote.

But the Water Vole is in big trouble. Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust surveys, completed periodically across the past thirty years, have revealed a massive decline in water vole numbers.

On the Cotswold Rivers, those small populations that still survive are all too small and isolated for long term survival. If no action is taken, this harmless and attractive creature will become extinct here as it has done already in Cornwall and is perilously close to in Devon.

As much as we like Stephen Fry, we would not want him puffing along the River Churn in twenty years time looking for our last remaining vole! But the case is frighteningly close. Gloucestershire people can not expect rhinos, dolphins, manatee and other exotic creatures to be conserved if we do not look after our own native wildlife.

The great news is that there are good value solutions and they are already working in another part of the county. My colleague John Field has been busy for the last 18 months turning conservation theory into new voles. Working with landowners, who are the single most important people in water vole conservation, he has been successful in achieving measurable results (more voles!) along lengths of watercourse in the Vale of Berkeley. The techniques are simple and straightforward, but their application takes time, patience and careful riverside management. These factors are not cheap but the results are very encouraging.

Water voles need plenty of riverside cover, toothsome grasses and sedges, and no Mink. To achieve this mixture, cattle and other large creatures must be kept well back from the waterside with fencing and overhanging trees thinned or pollarded. Predatory Mink are the critical ingredient in the water vole recipe. Careful and continuous control of this efficient non-native predator is critical. American Mink ‘hoover up’ Water Voles, the two animals just don’t get along together!

In the course of designing the next phases of the Trust’s vole programme we have enjoyed much amusement whilst planning and budgeting furiously. The vole-word has become part of a continuous stream of odd jokes, much in the vein of Radio 4 ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a Clue’. Puns about Voleunteers, Voletmeters and Revoleution give fun to the working day. However, the cleverest joke of all was made by the photographer from Cotswold Life who came to take photographs for their October edition in which I'm interviewed. Her instant response to one of our dodgy vole jokes was to respond with "Volegarians"!

Water Vole (c) Steven Dorey

Raising Funds

I am proud to be a Rotarian, albeit a serial underachiever due to work time restricting my freedom to attend meetings. Rotarians raise enormous sums of money both at the local level, such as my Dursley Rotary Club and through Rotary International. The Jessie May Trust, GL11 Community Project, Acorns, Yercombe Lodge and Cotswold Care Hospice are all currently benefiting from the Dursley club’s activities.

Amateur fundraising is impressive but as charities grow, the need for a professional approach becomes essential. The Wildlife Trust needs £800,000 a year to carry out its core work protecting Gloucestershire’s wildlife for Gloucestershire people. This is no minor challenge and needs a very organised and hard working team to keep the funds flowing.

When we want to carry out ambitious, cutting edge work, the costs are quite scary. My current challenge with the team is to safeguard the future of the water vole in the Cotswolds. To employ expert staff to do this for the next five years will cost over £0.5M! If we take no action we could end up like Cornwall, which has lost its whole water vole population.

I recently met the creative minds of Square Peg with my team. This specialist agency is advising us how to explain the mysteries of isolated water voles populations, habitat fragmentation and predation by unwanted foreign mustelids, into plain English. We know what we want to do and how it will prevent the water vole becoming extinct along entire reaches of the Rivers Leach, Evenlode, Windrush and more. If we take no action the future for the friendly and harmless little Ratty, the character from Wind in the Willows, is bleak.

If a rich and prosperous county like Gloucestershire does not take action to protect a rapidly declining mammal, we do not have any right to expect third world citizens to defend the Tiger, Rhinoceros or Panda. Creativity and professional fund raising can make all the difference between success and failure. But we all share a responsibility for keeping the county the wonderful place that makes it such a joy to inhabit.

Water vole (c) Paul Gregory

Living with Change

The Parliamentary year of 2009 will go down in the memory of professional politicians as not their finest period. Sub-let flats, houses for ducks and the odd moat clearance have created in public mind the appearance of a culture based on the self interest of members, rather than the discharge of democratic and party duties.

I am not a political animal, (although my wife says I should be one when I start up on one of my heartfelt rants about environmental issues). I do, however, value the hard work and commitment that MPs apply to their constituency duties. I have worked alongside many Gloucestershire parliamentarians and I have found them all to be dutiful and cooperative. Our very biased family favourite would be the late Charles Irvine MP who not only hosted a Wildlife Appeal event at his home in Cheltenham, but also reduced my daughters to beaming happiness with large tins of House of Commons butterscotch (he chaired the House catering committee)!

The Trust’s cruise along the Gloucester-Sharpness canal featured a large group of distinguished and most welcome guests. David Drew, MP for Stroud, and his wife were particularly welcome and I was very pleased that they had been able to make space in their diaries for our four hour excursion. Indeed, David was typical of the majority of our guests as he had not before been able to justify the trip. Like me he was struck by the totally different view of the Severn Vale that is given from the perspective of this functional canal.

I emailed David on a business matter following our trip and last Thursday I spent a full hour talking about a wide range of matters with him. The theme of our discussion, although not the issue that I had raised originally, became that of the general failure of Gloucestershire folk to show off the wonders of their county. Indeed, I have never quite understood how one of England’s most diverse historic, cultural and ecological landscapes is so poorly promoted. Even worse is a general belief that the countryside is to be taken for granted, that the people who live there are overly fortunate and have no social problems, and that there no real jobs or prosperity in rural industries.

The environmental and land-based industries generate almost 6% of Gross National Product. Across the UK almost 1 million people are paid workers in these industries and another 0.5M give their time voluntarily. The upshot of this is the quality of life that Gloucestershire people (and the South West RDA) take for granted. Gloucester City and Cheltenham Town both benefit from their settings within the Severn Vale, framed by the hills of the Forest of Dean and the Cotswolds. Neither location would be nearly so fine without these backdrops or the wonderful green spaces and street trees that set off their buildings and urban features.

The Trust’s Living Landscape programmes exist to show the importance of the environment as the key component within a healthy society that has an economy growing within environmental limits. The Severn Vale project that David Drew saw is the stage one of the first of these. In October, the Trust will be announcing its next visionary programme. Over the next decades of climate-driven change, without fully joined-up policies, programmes and investment decisions, our county will not continue to be the Living Gloucestershire that we all currently take for granted. The Trust intends to set the pace to support Gloucestershire living with change.

Licensed to Practise

My work with the Trust and Lantra give me the enjoyable combination of practical outcomes at county level and influencing strategy and policy at UK level. This work also gives me insight into the advantages and drawbacks of trying to work with Government.

The Wildlife Trust is a registered charity that is not at all restricted in its activities, other than to fulfil its members’ wishes whilst observing legal and regulatory obligations. That means that it is free to focus on its Vision of a Living Gloucestershire, rich in wildlife, valued by everyone. The Trust spends the monies that it raises through membership subscriptions and other fundraising on the county’s wildlife as it pleases, unrestricted by Government policy.

Lantra is also a charity that must observe rules and regulations at UK and Scottish level. But its special status is that, being licensed by all four Governments as a Sector Skills Council (SSC); it receives special funding to carry out specific qualifications and business development work. The downside to being the only body that represents all 17 of the industries that make up the environmental and land based sector, is the very thing that gives Lantra is status – its license to practise.

In 2006 Lord Leitch published a report commissioned on the future skills needs of the UK. In implementing most of the Leitch recommendations a decision was made by the UK Government both to set up a new regulatory body, the UKCES, and to carry out a review of all 25 SSCs.

Relicensing is now almost complete with the last group of five SSCs reaching the assessment stage. The principal source of evidence for the UKCES on Lantra’s performance is a detailed report drawn up by the National Audit Office. With Peter Martin, Lantra’s CEO, I will be interviewed by commissioners Sir Charlie Mayfield (Chairman of John Lewis Partnership) and Grahame Smith (General Secretary of the STUC) on Wednesday. I am confident that Lantra’s licence will be approved, but working with government means that this is not the end of the story.

Lord Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business, Industry and Skills, is currently contemplating restructuring the skills framework for England. My worry is that one of the options under consideration could end the SSC network in favour of regional skills strategies drafted and overseen by the Regional Development Agencies. Whilst this might seem sensible, the damage for the 17 industries currently covered by Lantra would be that they do not rank highly alongside the usual suspects when measured in terms of GDP, employment footprint and urban relevance. In regional skills strategies environmental conservation, like forestry, horticulture and agriculture are very likely to be invisible, ignored and unsupported.

The excellent work that Lantra has carried out over the years would be wasted within a regional structure and organisations in the sector would not have a skills champion with vision, expert knowledge and a holistic industry view. Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust has benefited from several of Lantra’s skills initiatives. The environmental and land based industries would be damaged by the loss of the SSC network. The next few months will be critical in resolving the future of the skills framework for England.

Trust in Charity

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust has been very successful over the years because of a not so secret ingredient. The success of a charity depends on the quality of its people, staff and volunteers. The most important group of unpaid workers are the Trustees, who carry a heavy burden of legal and regulatory responsibilities for no reward other than a sense of achievement.

Trustees are literally the heart and head of the Trust. They protect the values and vision of the organisation; ensure that the charity’s money is spent properly and within budget and look ahead to where the Trust might be headed. These are the same tests as commercial company directors but without any financial rewards.

I have had the pleasure of spending time with some of my Trustees over the past few days. Three sharp minds, experienced in a wide range of fields, have given critical insight into their views of the Trust’s challenges. Anthony Hird, Mike Martin and Gill Richards each share a passion for nature and believe that the Wildlife Trust is making a difference. They continue to give their time and energy in the knowledge that the next few decades will see the county’s climate changing more rapidly than at any time in recent history. This will add serious new pressures to plant and animal communities that are already restricted in range and abundance through human activity.

The Trust is reviewing its future strategy over the next few months and this is the most important contribution that trustees can make to a charity’s future. One of my favourite management sayings is that for every problem there is an obvious solution – that is almost certainly the wrong one. Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust’s board will be questioning its future direction and the major problems that it will be facing.

A Trustee's job is to ask all those simple but infuriatingly hard questions that start with the letter W. What are we going to do, why will we be doing it and what will be the benefit? In heading up the staff team, my W words are to suggest the Way forward and how we will find the Wherewithal to pay for it! Wildlife will be the beneficiary if we get the mixture right!

We always welcome new applications to become a Trustee or a member of one of our advisory committees. See our AGM notice for more information.

Photography by Philip Precey

CARRY ON CRUISING

I don’t work in a profession where corporate entertainments are the norm but most years, one or two pleasant opportunities arise. I have had several invitations for trips from Gloucester to go south along the canal towards Sharpness but have been unable to accept previous invitations because of work or other commitments. How pleasant then to have finally taken the trip on a sunny afternoon yesterday.

I did not even have to wrestle with my conscience this time as the boat was paid for by one of the Trust’s own projects. It was in fact my job to host the party of over 40 partners and supporters for the afternoon. The aim of the expedition was to explain the workings of the Trust’s Severn Vale Living Landscape Project and to show off some of the achievements of the past 12 months.

We were extremely fortunate that so many of our invitees found time to come along for the short cruise. Indeed, many of those on board had worked together for years and a great deal of intense Gloucestershire networking was taking place, some of it actually relating to the wildlife of the Severn and its adjoining countryside.

The canal itself is the forerunner of the M5 motorway. Opened in 1827, it acted as an enormously important waterway between the estuary at Sharpness and inland river access to the Midlands. I can well remember in the 1980s when significant vessels still carried timber and oil up to the Gloucester. Now it is just a pleasure routeway enjoyed by resident canal folk and holiday makers. Apart from the historic tall ships that berth in the city, there is no significant trade activity.

The Trust’s Severn Vale project is working with the farmers and landowners of the vale to assist them with integrating wildlife into farm management plans. The biggest success in the first year has been the enthusiastic involvement of the Clifford family who have entered their entire estate into a high level management scheme.

The Cliffords have lived in Frampton for almost 1000 years. It seems entirely natural that a modern approach to wildlife conservation should be so thoroughly understood by land managers who are such an integral part of this historic county.

Photographs by Margaret McGlone and Emma Bradshaw

BACK TO THE BLOG

It’s good to be back in action after a rather disrupted June and July. John Lennon is quoted as saying: “Life is what messes up your plans”. Indeed, I had not planned for the event that occurred and disrupted a recent trip to Antrim, and had certainly not planned for four weeks signed off as medically unfit to drive a car!

Television advertisements do not generally hold my attention but I am very glad that Margaret and I both remembered FAST. The early signs of a stroke can usually be detected by looking for Facial changes, Arms that don’t move freely, Speech that is slurred – Telephone for help! I awoke in our hotel, immobile and unable to coordinate my arm movements. Mags called for an ambulance and Antrim Area Hospital was extremely caring, but it wasn’t quite like the trip to the Giant’s Causeway that we had planned for that weekend.

I am now fully recovered from what was technically a mini-stroke or Transient Ischaemic Attack; a temporary loss of blood flow to the brain, resulting in symptoms that clear within 24 hours. The cause of this impediment has not yet been found but as a result of very high-tech medical scanning, I now have documentary proof that I am the owner of both a heart and brain. Clearly, on the day of the TIA, they were not getting on together as well as I had become accustomed!

My knowledge of strokes before my TIA was minimal, but I had remembered that TV Gardener Monty Don had vanished from our screens following a similar experience. I found his description of events reassuring from the perspective of having been a similarly busy person who suddenly found that life was unexpectedly different.

However, like Monty, I am extremely fortunate in having made a full recovery with no side effects. The main challenge now is not to recreate the level of work and commitment that I had become used too. Not because this had been part of the cause, merely that life is surprisingly short and deserves full appreciation. Clement Freud’s funniest comment is literally entombed with him, I just want any ‘best before date’ on my headstone to be some way in the future yet!

This leads on to the announcement that Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust will be proudly sponsoring Monty Don's talk on wildlife gardening at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday 17th October 2009. Tickets are £9 and available from the box office on 08445 767979. See the Trust website for more information.

30 years at The Trust

If one is measured by the company one keeps then I must once have been a curious individual. At least that is my analysis of a short speech made by my boss, Trust Chairman Hugh Tollemache on Monday.

Once a month we have an all-staff meeting at our Conservation Centre in Gloucester. On Monday I was particularly impressed by the number of staff attending; one or two absentees due to previous appointments, but an almost 100% turnout. What I failed to spot was a very pleasant ambush that had been planned at the end of the formal business. I had forgotten that this week marks my 30th anniversary of working with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust.

The curious company reference is not related to my excellent colleagues. The link was in fact 1979 when two other people also began new jobs. Margaret Thatcher and Saddam Hussein took over their new respective roles and I began work as the ‘Executive and Conservation Officer of the Gloucestershire Trust for Nature Conservation’. The other two members of the class of '79 have now left office but I am still batting on!

The reason that I am still in Gloucestershire is that I have never seen another job that would offer as many opportunities or as much reward as working for The Trust. Since 1979 we have achieved a good deal for the county’s wildlife and are well placed to do even more over the next 30. The Board of Trustees said a very gracious 'thank you' at their Board meeting on Monday evening. It is great to part of a brilliant group of volunteers and staff, supported by 23,000 members, all committed to Gloucestershire’s future.

It would be very easy to get carried away with thoughts of a devoted fan club after such a lovely surprise. To be thanked at all, after merely doing my job, is wonderful. However, there is usually a reality check inbuilt within any surprise. In this case, my colleagues have clubbed together to have me towed to a height of 3,000ft above Nympsfield and cast adrift in an unpowered aircraft.

I have never flown a glider. However, the great Sir Peter Scott set a world gliding altitude record from the same airfield. Perhaps Sir Peter is the real company with which to be compared. He helped found The Trust in 1961 and is one of the leaders of the conservation movement. It certainly is great to be even a small part of such an important movement.

Photogaph (c) Paul Nicholls

Dipping out

I am always enthusiastic that exciting and interesting records of wildlife are passed on to specialists or to the Gloucestershire Environmental Records Centre. But sometimes it is impossible not to become a little bit envious when told of a particularly good record. That is what happened this afternoon when I was phoned by Margaret, who had just enjoyed a particularly fine walk with Milli the dog.

Travelling around the UK is a good way of seeing the richness of the countryside. But the downside of travel is the dull time spent in comfortable but characterless hotel rooms. My temporary accommodation in Antrim has given me views of the local Swallows, Greenfinches and the occasional ‘hoodie’. What it does not have is a cheerful little river burbling along outside.

The redevelopment of the old Listers site in Dursley has now generated some wildlife wins. The River Cam, which was for many years imprisoned for over a mile within a dirty, polluted pipeline, has once again been opened to the air. Now much more free flowing, the river has cleaned itself of the silt and dirt that it had accumulated. It is clear and should support a greater range of invertebrates.

That has been supported by Margaret’s unexpected sighting of a young Dipper and one of its parents not 100 metres from our house. The Dipper’s disappearance from many of England’s rivers has been an indication that water quality had declined worryingly.

The Dipper is a fascinating bird with the amazing skill of being able to walk along the bottom of even fast flowing watercourses whilst searching for insect food. It looks a little like an oversized Wren with a distinctive white bib. Now, I have never seen a Dipper on the Cam and I don’t see or hear the Kingfisher as frequently as Margaret. Despite being a conservation professional, I have no confidence in beating her to the double that she is now looking forward to. To see a Dipper and a Kingfisher in one view really would be something and put the Cam firmly on the wildlife map.

Photograph (c) Richard Carter on Flickr

Reading the landscape

I am not a great fan of air travel, but the journey from Gloucestershire to Belfast is significantly quicker and faster by air from Bristol rather than a mixture of road and ferry trips.

However, one of the benefits of a clear aerial view such as the one I enjoyed this morning whilst being circulated over Lough Neagh, is the opportunity to study the patterns of fields set out in a patchwork below.

The shapes and distribution of field boundaries, combined with other clues such as ridge and furrow patterns and odd circles and stripes, can give a historic view of the past. Writers such as Pennington, Hoskins and Rackham are good sources to begin time travelling. But what really matters is creative imagination.

The landscape is like a giant child’s magic writing board. Each generation leaves traces that are in turn partially overwritten by the next. I have heard a posher description of this as a palimpsest. Whatever the description, the result is a fascinating mixture of agriculture, forestry, wild places and hard features such as roads.

The secret of reading the countryside is simple. Irregular outlines tend to be ancient, straight lines and square corners more modern. The countryside around Belfast is mostly regular, revealing the field shapes established by planned boundaries. However, there are intriguing irregularities.

A small island close to Lough Neagh’s shorelines suggested an Ulster version of an artificial Iron Age island, known in Scotland as aacrannog. I am probably wrong, but the possibility filled my imagination until touch down at Belfast International.

Image (c) Amy Groark on Flickr

The distribution of slow worms in Gloucestershire

Data courtesy of Gloucestershire Centre for Environmental Records

In my excitement over the allotment slowworms, I forgot to ask my colleagues at the Gloucestershire Environmental Records Centre (GCER) just how common this legless lizard is in Cam. I was offered a trade by Holly York at GCER to provide a 6 figure grid reference in exchange for a distribution map of slowworm records and I was shocked to find that there has only ever been one previous record for the parish and that was made 25 years ago.

It seems that not only are our colony still supporting breeding slowworms, it is the only current record of them. But does that mean that this is a very rare creature? Possibly not, it is more likely that records of this enigmatic little reptile are simply not being provided for the parish.

Species recording is generally patchy and for many creatures, the availability of quality data is very poor. This is odd as the UK has the best studied flora and fauna of any country in the world. So why do we apparently know so little? I believe that there are three reasons:

Firstly, the value of wildlife recordings is not understood. Without good information, conservation strategy is hard to design properly. Secondly, there is a worrying shortage of active recorders and there are very few younger people becoming experts in identification. Thirdly, the system for recording and storing important information is not well known.

In Gloucestershire, Linda and Holly at GCER welcome all sighting data. Contact them at gcer@gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk or on 01172 309119.

For those interested in learning more about the natural world around them, I suggest the following three websites as excellent places to start. Whilst they are Gloucestershire biased, they give a good starting point into biodiversity and surveying networks.

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust organising over 300 public activities a year.

National Biodiveristy Network which co-ordinates species recording across the UK.

Gloucestershire Naturalists Society where the county’s top specialists can be contacted.

Learning for life

pictured from l to r: Hugh Tollemache, Henry Elwes, Patricia Broadfoot & Gordon McGlone

“I am delighted to sign this Memorandum of Understanding with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. Together we have already produced this wonderful guide to the wildlife of The Park. We welcome members of the local community who would like to visit and enjoy the campus. Universities are not scary places at all.”

Genuine words of sentiment that I was honoured to hear from Patricia Broadfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Gloucestershire speaking at our breakfast meeting held in Cheltenham on Wednesday.

I have been working with a very committed top team from the University for two years to find ways in which a Wildlife Trust and a place of higher learning can find areas where together they may be more effective in partnership. The outcome of our first collaboration has been a full wildlife study of the Park and a lovely illustrated leaflet that explains its history. Few Cheltenham people know that the site was originally designed as a menagerie with a central lake in the shape of Africa!

My single biggest piece of learning from this is has been to find the huge commitment within the university to make itself accessible for learners of all ages. This is quite a change from my university days in the late 1960’s. Then only 5% of school leavers were able to study for a degree. Older people and those who had not had the advantages of a grammar school education could not easily benefit from the excitements of study and discovery.

Open public access to the campus is a first stage in helping to show that universities are very much a part of the life of the community. The Trust and the university will be developing a range of learning activities that will give access to experts for people wishing to understand environmental and wildlife subjects. Together we aim to make the natural world more immediate and relevant. This is a very necessary task, the environment needs more friends – and quickly.

The future is a foreign place

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was a seminal piece of writing that changed the way that the chemicals that had become available after World War 2 were affecting wildlife. Small songbirds dying from the effects of agricultural chemicals that people believed to be safe were a dramatic wake-up call from the wild.

Carson’s book and visible changes to the countryside resulted in the development of a huge range of environmental bodies across the world. The Gloucestershire Trust for Nature Conservation (now Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust) was formed in 1961 by local people who wanted to safeguard the counties wildlife.

The willingness of people to make changes that benefit their communities is still alive and well. Three of the current challenges that are firing the imaginations of local thinkers are Climate Change, Food Security and Peak Oil. Each of these issues is as huge as Rachel Carson’s global alert on pesticides such as organochlorines and the ‘drins’. Books such as The Transition Handbook by Rob Hoskins are a good example of this thinking.

Localness is strong and alive within the ‘Transition Town’ movement http://www.transitionculture.org/ . Local groups are thinking about a very different future in which energy prices are much higher, food more expensive and the climate several degrees warmer that today’s.

I spoke to a very insightful group of 50 local people about the importance of understanding the need to maintain local biodiversity issues within the transition agenda. The Newent Transition Town meeting confirmed that there is a huge reserve of energy and intelligence that may provide fresh insights into how societies will adjust.

We must all adapt to rising oil prices and increased fous on local food production. But it is imperative that the mistake of not giving wildlife priority is not repeated in future strategies. If we do not accommodate biodiversity Rob Hoskins’ vision of travelling from oil dependency to local resilience will not be achieved. The environment is an integrated system. Wildlife locks the pieces together.

Back to nature

One of the perils of becoming a manager in any organisation is the distance that may develop between you and the very thing that got you into the business in the first place. In my case, I see little wildlife from my desk (apart from the very obliging long-tailed tit that occasionally sits in the bush outside the window. However, every so often there is the very real treat of visiting one of the Trust’s 60 plus nature reserves.

This week I had the very real thrill of being out in the woods when I hosted a visit by some of The Trust’s loyal members to our Lower Woods Nature Reserve. This wonderful square mile of ancient woodland was gifted to Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust by the estate of the late Duke of Beaufort. Since the gift of the site, we have been able to invest in essential fencing, gates, signs, bridges and all the other infrastructure that is essential for effective and safe nature reserve management.

There is still much to be done in Lower Woods and on the other Nature Reserves that The Trust manages. However, the outlook for major new projects is looking difficult. Sources of grant aid will be hit hard by the twin impacts of the 2012 Olympics and the recession. The Olympics will prove a real drain on government funds as commitments are honoured and the legacy is ensured and the recession is already shrinking the income of commercial supporters and the investment income of private trusts.

But Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust withstood both the 1980s and 1990s recessions and actually grew in size and capacity. There is a tendency in the media to dwell on the glum side of events. Investing in wildlife is the one good news story that ensures better future returns than the speculative hedge funds of the City.

It was certainly good to be able to share this optimistic outlook yesterday with the 70 members who shared a great walk in over 600 acres of bluebell covered woodland.

Crossing the river at Lower Woods (c) Margaret McGlone

Conservation Skills

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust has been a benevolent employer to me. The job is exciting, the people wonderful and the sense of achieving something very motivating! I have also been allowed to become involved in work that might not seem to have obvious importance to Wildlife Conservation.

During the last significant recession in the 1980s, the government implemented a major job creation scheme. At its peak The Trust, with only nine core staff itself, was employing another 100 Community Programme workers. One of the key pieces of organisational learning to emerge from our 1984-88 programme was the importance of training and skills.

We were carefully able to pool funds to create a significant training budget. This was used to ensure that everyone on our community scheme could do their job properly. The results were very rewarding. We achieved really good quality work and the success rate of participants returning to mainstream employment was very high. The participants got better jobs, the government reduced unemployment and Gloucestershire’s wildlife got a better deal!

Because of our experience in Gloucestershire, I was asked to participate in drafting the first vocational nature conservation qualification, an NVQ. The team that put the NVQ together comprised people actually doing the jobs that the qualification was designed for. But the end result was far from perfect because the educational machinery of Whitehall in the 1990s insisted on a structure and language that made the NVQ obscure and inaccessible.

Almost 20 years later, employers and employees still make the case that vocational qualifications are not quite what they want. Lantra and the other 24 Sector Skills Councils are now well placed to shape vocational education. But there is still a large gap between the future skills needs of industries like environmental conservation and the competences of those trying to gain work in the best jobs around. Skills supply and demand has a place even in the work of the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust.

Photograph (c) The Wildlife Trusts

Tide changes for marine wildlife

Structured nature conservation got going in the UK with pioneering legislation passed just after the Second World War. For the first time, important terrestrial wildlife sites could be protected in a statutory network of Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Because of this 1949 legislation, important plants and animals that live above the high tide mark have been reasonably protected.

Sadly, this is only half of the story as our estuarine and marine wildlife has largely remained unprotected. Is that important? Yes, absolutely! There is even more fabulous wildlife in the seas around the British Isles than on the mainland and islands.

But the tide may be changing in favour of the sea horses, sea anemones, seals and corals, species that live largely unseen within our coastal waters. The Marine and Coastal Access Bill now before the House of Lords will, for the first time, give substantial legal protection to our special marine places.

DEFRA Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, confirmed the English government’s commitment to establishing Marine Protected Areas at our Wildlife Trusts Marine Dinner, held appropriately at the Fishmongers Hall in London on Tuesday last week. The Wildlife Trusts have worked hard to progress this essential legal protection for our precious Marine Wildlife. The Marine Act, when it is passed, will be as important in its way as existing wildlife legislation.

Speakers at the dinner referred to this exciting development as a seminal moment in the history of nature conservation. We were each given a goody bag at the end of the evening. If I was a believer in Karma and reincarnation, I would now have a clear view as to my likely status in a future life. The bone china mug in my bag featured the Long-snouted Sea Horse, a unique species, largely restricted to Studland Bay and suffering habitat loss due to sailors tearing up Eel Grass with their anchors. This is a species with a poor conservation outlook, but the males make good really good sea-horse dads. Perhaps I might even be doing something right in this life!

Spiny Seahorse (c) danjc003 on Flickr

Home is where the heart is

My love of wildlife started when, as a very small person, I began exploring the damp, crumbly places that I found under the stones and hedgerow of our modest Southampton home. As I grew, my home range extended to the bomb site at the bottom of the road. There I found a common lizard that scuttled around a big pile of rubble and a fabulous butterfly bush that attracted scores of peacocks, small tortoiseshells and the occasional comma.

I still find the best wildlife close to my home here in Gloucestershire. My patch now includes organic allotments that have given me two wildlife “wows” in the last month – two creatures at very different ends of the visibility scale but each having their own magic.

The allotments that my wife Margaret and I run are managed of the perma-culture raised-bed system. This includes the use of carpet to cover paths and uncultivated spots. Each year in spring we look forward to our first sighting of the slow worms that have emerged from their winter hibernation. Last Sunday we found two adults, one of them probably the mother of two exquisite babies that lay curled nearby. Even the Royal jeweller could not create such beauty as their tiny bronze bodies with jet black undersides.

At the other end of the show-off scale was the red kite that drifted along the scarp inspecting the allotments in the clear hope of some tasty snack! The kite is a spectacular bird, graceful in the air and mildly patterned in reds and subtle gold. It has not yet re-established itself as a breeding bird in the county but it cannot be long before it does.

Slow worm (c) Colin Varndell, Red kite (c) Wildstock