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