View From The Shed by Volunteer Shaun - ARE YOU LOCAL?

ARE YOU LOCAL?

David Attenborough. Steve Irwin. Simon King. Gordon Buchannon. Saba Douglas-Hamilton. Hans and Lotte Hass.

Depending on your age and level of interest, some of these people may be familiar to you. If you don’t know the others, try to find their work on YouTube or similar. They have all made an impact on me through their wildlife films and I suspect that you’ll be equally impressed. They were all groundbreaking in their day and they all introduced into my living room aspects of the natural world that I never knew existed. I thank them all.

They didn’t just turn up at some place of natural beauty and turn their cameras on though. They (or their underpaid underlings) did weeks, months, even years of research beforehand, more often than not employing the help of an experienced and knowledgeable local guide to point them in the right direction to see things that may never have been filmed before. 

For example, Springwatch and the associated shows from all the other seasons (they’re all called Springwatch in my house whatever the time of year) have their ‘story developers’. These are people whose enviable job it is to watch the live camera feeds from all the birds’ nests that the programme is keeping an electronic eye on and record anything that looks interesting enough for Chris Packham and co. to talk about on the ‘live’ show. These people put in many hours of hard work to provide the couple of minutes that makes good TV and gives the presenters something to talk about. It’s the graft, preparation and local knowledge that allows them to be at the right place at the right time. 

Relating that to our beautiful Dearne Valley, that’s part of our Old Moor Welcome Volunteers’ job - to know stuff that hopefully means you have a better experience when you visit. That might be as simple as pointing out paths on a map or more complex, like using our experience to tell visitors where a certain bird might be.

We try to always have at least one person who lives in the area working at the Welcome Shed whenever the site is open. Hopefully they will be able to answer most of the questions that visitors ask about the reserve and the local area. If not, we should be able to find a grown-up to help.

I’m a big proponent of using local knowledge whenever I travel abroad. If I have a dodgy schoolboy grasp of the language I’ll try to ask someone who lives there, “What’s that bird?” If not I’ll just point and revert to loud tourist English. I can see the look on their faces, as if they have me marked down as the underqualified result of some third-rate foreign (to them) education system, but they’re usually polite enough to explain that these are the most common birds in the area and they’ve seen them every day since birth. Yet to me it’s the first time I've ever seen it. It is, as they say, “a lifer”. Their local knowledge saves my ignorance, if not my embarrassment. 

We had an Australian visitor come to Old Moor earlier this month. He was hoping to see what he called, “your cute English Kingfisher. It’s so teenie-tiny!”  I guess it is, especially when compared to some of the 18 inch monsters he might see back home in Oz. He’d asked me where there might be a chance to see one and (local knowledge alert!) I told him where we’d had several sightings every day recently and thankfully, he saw what he’d come for. Just like me overseas, this ‘foreigner’ was delighted that local knowledge helped him see something he might not have found on his own.

I’m a ‘turn up and see what I see’ kind of birdwatcher. I’ll decide where I want to go for a nice day out and do a little bit of research as to what kind of birds generally live there but that’s as far as it goes. Many serious birdwatchers have a standard benchmark figure of seeing 200 birds in a year. I have yet to reach this target. Minimal research yields minimal results - and to me aiming for a specific number of specific species seems a little too much like hard work. Not so some of my friends though. One of our RSPB staff once said, “I have to leave a little early tonight mate. I’m going to try to see a King Eider duck off the coast of Redcar.” That’s a two hour drive, after an eight hour work shift, on the off-chance that he might see a duck that may or may not still be there and even if it is it’ll be a distant dot in the sea on his telescope. And then, successful or otherwise, a two hour drive home.

That’s dedication that I don’t have, but it’s also doing your research. My pal had learned enough from those who had gone before him to know exactly where and when to put himself to get the best chance of seeing this strange looking duck. And it worked. Yes, he had to wait a short while but sure enough the duck turned up on the night he went, at precisely the same place and the same time as it had been seen for several days beforehand. He saw the King Eider, a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many Brits. I went home and had a pasta bolognese. It was delicious. But which one of us had the best experience, the one that would live in the memory the longest? And it only worked for him because he’d gained the necessary local knowledge. 

I am in no way  as committed as my Shed-Brother, but I enjoy my birdwatching just as much as he does. Sometimes it’s just fun to wander, to explore aimlessly just for the fun of not knowing what might occur. But sometimes, a little knowledge can be a good thing.