April’s blog is a bit late (my apologies) as this has been a very busy month ending with my big move to Orkney!
This month has been a busy one. I was fortunate to receive John Muir Award Leadership Training and what a fabulous day it was! Building dens, creating colour cards and exploring different activitieswe can use to enable volunteers to connect with the environment around us. It 
was so inspiring and something I definitely want to incorporate into my traineeship. A John Muir award for an underwater habitat would be a fantastic achievement!
I also attended the SBIF conference. This was hosted at SNH in Perthshire and what a lovely location it was. The guests were all fantastic and it proved to be a great opportunity for me to network and meet like-minded people. The conference was all about sharing knowledge and data with the public in an easier and more useful way. Not an easy task to achieve but it was great to see a community of people dedicated to the task.
I had a great day out with my fellow trainees in Scotland when we visited Nik in Cumbernauld to look into the history of the town and the living landscape project that Nik is working on. This inspired me to consider how our beaches are used and why. An approach I had not considered before and one that I will hope to use up here in the Northern Isles.
I received a great opportunity this month to visit the National Museum Archives. And what a fascinating place it truly is! Massive warehouses full of shelves upon shelves upon shelves of specimens from every taxa you can possibly think of. With literally millions of specimens hunting down Non-Natives could have been an impossible task if it wasn’t for the help of Fiona Ware and a pre-made list of target species to look for. Our biggest surprise was the lack of some invasives and the volume of others. There were certainly many pacific Oyster and Slipper limpets compared to only 1 record of the Japanese skeleton shrimp put there by Fiona herself in 2013. Building on the collection they hold will be easy for me to integrate into my traineeship and I also have the opportunity to go through specimens held by SAMS to add to the archives. I am hoping I have the time to do this later in the year.
One of my most memorable days this month has to be working with primary school children in Fife with fellow TCV employees Rebecca and Scott as well as Stacey, a very dedicated TCV volunteer. It was a great day. Not only was the weather fantastic but the kids were great too. We hunted for shells and seaweed, played games, talked about litter and even found some nurdles! It was a fabulous day and one I slept well after!
April ended with my big move to Orkney! I have settled in fast and met so many lovely people at Heriot Watt ICIT campus in Stromness where I will be working out from for the summer. I can’t wait to get started! The photos below are of the ring of Brodgar and the Castle sea stack, 2 of Orkney’s archaeological and natural attractions!
What I can say about this month is that is has stretched my way of thinking in terms of what I can achieve with my traineeship and the impact I can make. Engage with school children, add to our historical collection of specimens, enhance the use and enjoyment of our beaches, increase the number of John Muir awards, increase the number of Non-Native Surveys in Scotland and maybe even help secure surveying and monitoring for the future. And all in a single year. I better pull on those wellies and get started.
