Hello all! I am Heather the new Visitor and Promotions Intern for Fairburn Ings, seeing as though I will be with you for the next 6 months I thought I’d better introduce myself. I am from a dairy farm in Mid-Wales so have always had a passion for getting outside and enjoying the countryside. Moving ‘Upppt north’ is wonderful as it means I get to enjoy so many new and exciting habitats such as the extensive wetlands at Fairburn Ings and improve my identification abilities to keep you updated on all the recent sightings! There are so many species I am eager to see whilst here including the elusive (or not so elusive at Fairburn) kingfisher.
To some of you my face may be vaguely familiar as I spent two marvellous weeks residential volunteering at Fairburn last December. During this time, I got to know the lovely Fairburn family and I quickly decided the RSPB was where I wanted to be. I spent three brilliant years in Aberystwyth completing an undergraduate degree in Physical Geography two years ago and I am currently studying a distance-learning Masters in Countryside Management with aspirations to move into a conservation-based career at some point in the future. However, the annoying stumbling block of all applications, the dreaded ...experience section. I have been working at Clarks shoe shop, but it isn’t really the sort of experience that helps to get a job with the RSPB.
I got the volunteering bug when I had a go at Wwoofing (it sounds odd, but it’s volunteering on organic farms with WWOOF, the World Wide Organisation for Organic Farming). I enjoyed 16 glorious weeks travelling around Scotland and Ireland, and had a go at loads of different activities from milking goats to putting up curtains. But that, along with various days spent volunteering still don’t really seem to be enough to get the elusive job, I felt I needed a good period of time working within conservation. So after spending 12 gloriously boring months selling shoes and pretending to care about bunions at Clarks shoe shop I am finally starting to gain this experience here at Fairburn Ings with the RSPB.
The RSPB Visitor and Promotions Internship was rather unknown to me until I volunteered at Fairburn. I never really considered all the hard work that goes into planning events, keeping people updated on the goings on of the reserve, organising the visitor centre, school events etc. After my two weeks here, I quickly came to realise how important the ‘inside’ jobs are to making a reserve click. I am now 2 days into this Internship and my calendar is swiftly filling up... I feel these 6 months are going to go very quickly! From the Big Wild Sleepout, Heron guided walks, membership weekend, family volunteering, the Big Hand Plant, pond dipping, birthday parties, mini-beast safaris and still so many projects yet to be organised there is so much to get excited about at Fairburn already and I have barely started!