I love getting stories from volunteers who have been inspired and amazed at the time they spend helping the nature around them. This week, Calum Wells tells us why he wants you to come and try volunteering at the RSPB in the Hebrides...
One of the first things I did in RSPB volunteer work, well, I think it was around the third thing, was walk twelve miles or so up and down hills and then sit in one place for what felt like an age and a half in harsh weather looking for sea eagles. It was surprisingly fun. I have done a lot of RSPB work since then, and I still find it fun. Even when it is frustrating, you do tend to get a nice sense of accomplishment when you finish a bird survey in bad weather or similar.
There tends to be a strange sense of feast or famine depending on what sort of work you get. During some months there is not one day I spent with the RSPB that wasn't full of hard work, like making stooks and trekking coastlines, and then it see-saws into a month or two of sitting in a field for an hour checking up on tern colonies, where the most tiring part was repositioning every now and then to avoid pins and needles. This means that I am often caught completely off guard to what I am going to do, and in my opinion that isn't a bad thing
The RSPB have a great many uses for corn, so one day I found myself in a field with a pitchfork shovelling sheaves of corn into a tractor trailer. After we had filled the trailer with almost half the corn from the field we then transported it to another field many miles away and started unloading it and constructing stacks. While we were unloading the corn my supervisor, with his characteristic presence of mind and physical co-ordination, managed to warn everyone of a hole in the bottom of the trailer half a minute or so before nearly falling down it himself.
Making a stack is a lot more complicated than one might think. You must make sure that it has a very wide base. It must be as circular as you can get it to be. And you must always point the sheaves you are adding to the stack so that the seed faces in the right direction. You must build up on this base and ensure the whole thing tapers to a point. Then you will have a stack of corn around the height of a man that will be remarkably resilient to bad weather.
What you must not do is what I did, which was to start off on a base that was probably more of a rhombus than a circle, put the corn down any old way, and forget to taper it so you end up with a bizarre-looking vaguely cylindrical protrusion of corn sticking up from the ground and only held together by the net we put over it and the stacks we put around it to ensure nobody glared at it too much.
Corn buntings are an endangered species, which we’re looking to protect. For a while there have been feed sites that RSPB have been setting up around the islands. More recently the feedsites have been placed in cages to ensure that the corn buntings can reach them but not sheep and cattle. The cages are also to protect the corn buntings from predatory animals, like buzzards or merlins, while they’re feeding.
That’s meant that I’ve been making cages out of wood and bits of fence. It took a while for us to get a design that works. Eventually we settled on one by a process of trial and error. With two people working on them we averaged around three or four per day. By far the most important job was getting someone to distract Mack, an extremely cheerful dog that doesn't even belong to the house where we were making them, but kept showing up and making a nuisance of himself. This task usually fell to me. Whenever he got too close or interfered with us hammering staples into the wood, or got too close to the power tool, I would have to invent some sort of method of getting Mack to charge back off into the undergrowth whence he came.
I also learnt that corn buntings are a small brown bird, akin to a sparrow but bigger. They are actually a lot more interesting than my description makes them out to be. It’s just difficult to describe them in a way that sounds interesting! I suppose it’s something to do with the fact that their patterning does so much with a rather mundane colour that somehow isn't dull. This makes them interesting to look at, but the colours used make it a serviceable camouflage as well. It’s a bit like a sparrow, but brighter and better.
When I did the most exciting thing I’ve ever done with the RSPB I had no idea what I was getting myself into. We all piled onto a boat and set off. It was only after we had gone under a bridge that I realised that we wouldn’t be able to get back until 8 o’clock in the evening, when the tide would be low enough to let us through again. After a substantial amount of time imagining various possible methods of escape we stopped off at an island mostly consisting of beach where some of our party left to conduct some other research. As we sought to continue our journey we realised that a rope had wrapped around the propeller halting our progress onwards.
After a substantial amount of time trying to find a sacrificial volunteer to dive in and free the propeller we found that it had freed itself and we were able to carry on. When we reached our destination, Hasgair, we split up into two groups and explored either side of the island. Our purpose was to count the nesting birds, which left me in the unenviable position of clambering over rocks with fulmars nesting in them. There is something uniquely terrifying about climbing over a crag only to find three different angry parents preparing to throw up on you on the other side.
After we had completed our survey and I was no longer in danger of being spat on by a fulmar or struck on the head by an angry skua we all piled back in the boat and I suddenly realised what fun the whole day had been. After an amount of time was spent drinking beverages on deck and feeling good about ourselves, we picked up the others we had dropped off previously and headed for our home harbour, which we reached eventually after breaking down again and being towed in by a fishing boat.
On reflection, the volunteering I do at the RSPB is often tiring, difficult, sometimes exhausting work that I wouldn't sign myself up for and would definitely not enjoy normally. Somehow, though, it's fun. Somehow, walking several miles up and down hills and through boggy ground full of insects to check up on a single eagle chick, is great fun. I have no idea why. I suppose if I was going to turn this into a recruitment drive, I would ask you to come on and find out. In fact let’s do that, come on and find out.
Calum
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