… and also birdhouses, a hibernaculum, tree/shrub clearance and wildflower planting.
Yes, since my last blog I have been a busy little bee! I honestly cannot believe how quickly these past few weeks have passed. I have been meeting community groups, I have attended The John Muir Award and Community Engagement training through BTCV, and I have been filling my diary with numerous upcoming events.
Otter Spraints - a sign that otters are present on the river.
One of the many highlights of my placement is the survey work I get to take part in! Along with feeling like an animal tracker, there is always that chance of seeing some other interesting wildlife. I was out doing an otter survey last week and shall be doing more in the future. This involves looking for otter spraints – that’s poo for any non-zoological folk. Yes poo! On one of our visits we spied a kingfisher :). A rare site in a city; great news as this accompanied with the presence of spraints suggests the rivers in Glasgow are much healthier.
Funky footwear! The volunteers theme at Provan Hall today
Today I assisted with the Orange Staff/Rockcorps event at Provan Hall in Easterhouse, Glasgow. Rockcorps are a large company that organise local volunteers to do essential work for charities or partners within their community. They do the whole volunteering thing a little bit differently and they get volunteers in huge numbers; but all they ask for is 4 hours of volunteering and in return they give them a ticket to a concert or an artist’s gig. As one of the artist’s, Lady Gaga, said… ‘making volunteering fashionable!’. 65-67% of these volunteers say they will continue to volunteer in their community… so it’s a good way of getting a range of volunteers that may have never thought about it before. Check their website out if you like… http://www.rockcorps.com/. The telecommunication company Orange funded these concerts, and as they have a corporate/social environmental responsibility they also organise their staff to get involved in volunteering in a similar fashion.
Nearly 50 Volunteers!
Provan Hall in Easterhouse were lucky to have them this year and they had local Orange/t-mobile staff volunteering for the whole day :). They carried out some great work for Glasgow City Council that might not have been possible in such a short period, which will help towards increasing biodiversity and the appearance of Provan Hall for the surrounding community. It also gave the volunteers a chance to see a part of Glasgow they might not have seen had they not volunteered, which can only help the image of this part of Glasgow… especially as it is part of the proposed 7 Lochs Wetland Park. At the end of the day there were even people interested in volunteering again and they were asking if they could come back to the site to help out.
Dirty Digger!
It was a great day! There was music and yummy haggis on the go. Glasgow City Council’s Countryside Ranger’s were present and there were loads of activities available for volunteers to get stuck into for example bird boxes, wildflower planting, orchard tree planting and tree/shrub clearance. Today was a great opportunity for me to learn how a company can engage communities on a large scale and how getting corporate bodies involved can have community benefits.
I even changed my hair colour! Decided Orange was not a good look and went for Red ;).
Red/Orange hair bird and her house. One of many!
Bird house village!
I also assisted the Glasgow BTCV Midweek Group at St Mungo primary school where we cleared their garden space, tidied up the existing path and built a natural fence. I though it would be a great opportunity to get out with the volunteers that do a lot of GCC’s manual work and get some done myself. I then helped the school kids build a hibernaculum in the corner of their garden area. They were really eager to get stuck in with their spades!
Happy Diggers!
You know you have done a good day’s work digging, when you come home and earth falls out of ALL your clothes!