Who you gonna call??!…

Ghostbus……..oh wait…….Meeeeee!!!!

: Giant Hogweed Spraying

No, I haven’t joined the Ghostbusters. This was the compulsory attire for having a go at spraying the dreaded Giant Hogweed. I think its safe to say I am no longer scared of the stuff, but instead, relish in the opportunity to make it wither and die….(cue evil laugh)!

Ahem….In other news, since I last blogged, I have been extremely busy partaking in community engagement activities and such like 🙂

The outdoor ranger team meetings have continued on a theme of sowing wildflowers in random bare-patches around Stirling, including at the Wellgreen Care Home, where a gaggle of enthusiastic nursery children came to help. The elderly residents will have a lovely wildflower patch to look at outside the lounge instead of squidgy, bare grass and the odd Giant Hogweed sprouting up.

Heads in Buckets

I also got involved in working with Fallin Nursery to achieve Eco-School status. Scott and I got to work on re-vamping their small wildlife garden by getting the children to help us spread out a bark floor and to build some bug-boxes to hang on the fence.

Keeping with the theme of improving wildlife gardens and school grounds, I took a ranger stall an open day run by the Riverside Primary Grounds Improvement Parents Group (bit of a mouthful I know!). This was a day where parents and kids could come along and do their bit to care for the school grounds, and come to my stall to identify some night-time silhouettes and make crafty butterflies out of pegs and paper.

The next week I did some pond-dipping with some unruly, disengaged teenagers from a local high school who were working toward their John Muir Awards. A couple of individuals were very enthusiastic and got a lot from the day’s activities, whilst others, I felt, were just along for the ride. I suppose you’ve got to take some bad with the good.

At the complete other end of the scale, I spent one Friday evening, (yes I have no social life!), out sowing more wildflower seeds with a group of 40 local Scouts as part of On The Verge Stirling. Somehow it all worked out really well and in a semi-organised fashion we got a 180m² patch planted in an hour.

Of course, in amongst all this activity I have managed to fit in 3 training courses, including Risk Assessment, Working with Volunteers in the Outdoors, and a Beetle ID Workshop which was really interesting and I have started my very own collection of insect specimens.

Back Walk Action Day

As part of the ranger team, I helped out at one of our Community Action Days clearing the Back Walk by Stirling Castle. Despite the lack of volunteers, we managed to clear a whole lot of litter and miscellaneous objects from the steep slopes. I did have a mishap along the way when I ventured off the beaten track to retrieve a stray traffic cone and ended up sliding down the slope flat on my stomach, eventually gripping on for dear life by my fingernails! The life of a ranger is never dull, however I think some danger money wouldn’t go amiss! 😉

Last Monday I finally had the opportunity to put faces to names and met some of the big bosses in Land Services on a team get-together day, which saw some quality and sometimes random presentations from team leaders and a team-building activity where we had to build a track from rolled up newspapers and cable-ties and get the ball from one end to the other 3 times in the shortest time. Needless to say my team won hands-down!

My last two Saturdays have been filled with some high-quality community engagement, working at some events for Amanda.

The first was the iSpot Open Day at Balallan House where I worked with Amanda to give a great presentation all about Natural Communities, then we ran a bugs and beasties stall alongside Lucy and Faith, our fellow NC Trainees. As you can see below, we had loads of fun!

Teamwork?

: NC Trainees on form!

And the fun just kept on going at the Meet The Species event at West Quarter Glen in Falkirk…

In the office, I have been whittling away the days putting together a programme of ranger activities for the summer holidays in Cultenhove. I have attended lots of meetings to pin the details down and it finally looks like its coming together quite nicely, together with my improving negotiational skills 🙂

Hot on the agenda for every community in the Stirling area, and no doubt the entire country is dog-poo! I swear community meetings would be slashed in half time-wise if this horrible problem was finally wiped off the agenda! Maybe we can assign a squadron of people to go and spray-paint every turd in town in a nice glow-in-the-dark, imagine the millions of £’s the council would save by not having to switch the street-lamps on!

Anyway….enough of my ranting! Until next time…..adios!