Hello!
My name is Anni (well, actually it’s Annemarie but everyone agreed that it’s too long) and I’m one of the new residential volunteers at Saltholme. I’ve travelled about 600 miles from eastern Germany to get here and do some practical conservation work. After studying three years in a city quite close to the Baltic Sea, I thought it might be time for something new - that’s why I decided to go on a small adventure and see how conservation work is done abroad. I’ve already done some volunteering in Germany but the conservation charity I worked for didn’t have its own reserve. This makes Saltholme a good place to learn new things, especially how to manage a nature reserve. I’ve never done anything like that before! So far, I really enjoy working here and being a part of the team. Of course, being a foreigner brings challenges. I have to learn the English names of all the birds (that’s something nobody teaches you at school or university) and while I’m writing this blog, I constantly make spelling mistakes because the y and the z on German keyboards are interchanged. I don’t know how many blogs I have to write to get used to that.
I was surprised about how many people do voluntary work at Saltholme regularly and I think this is just great. Every Tuesday and Thursday, a group of volunteers comes to the reserve. This gives us the opportunity to complete tasks a lot faster. There is a suitable saying in German that translates to ‘many hands, fast end’. Last week, we cut down shrubs of sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides or Sanddorn, as I know it) to keep the place open for breeding waders and wintering wildfowl. They prefer open spaces where predators have nowhere to hide. After cutting all the shrubs, we had a fire yesterday.
The fire has just reached Caitlin-size
There is still some sea buckthorn left and we are going to cut even more. This wasn’t the last fire this winter.
Anni