Volunteering is a key aspect of the RSPB’s success as an organisation and for every one staff member, we have nine volunteers nationally. On the North Kent Marshes, this means that we get the job done, but also we have a great team of advocates, spreading the word about our work. Medway Local Group helps the North Kent Marshes – with volunteer support on public events such as the Wildlife and Country Fair, but as the account below shows, several members are also part of our dedicated weekly teams. We hope you enjoy their account of volunteer life and if you are inspired to get involved, at whatever level – please contact us.

Many thanks for the support Medway Local Group gives to the North Kent Marshes, not only in time but also through fund raising and promotion.

Chris Drake (Visitor and Publicity Officer)

Reserves are managed and maintained by a dedicated band of wardens, but they could not possibly do all the never-ending tasks all year round without the aid of a great army of helpers, who give up their time voluntarily to do all sorts of jobs, from bird counts and surveys to practical work and helping the public with information and guided walks. There is coppicing and erecting fences and signs, clearing pathways and moving away fly tipping deposited on the reserves to be done.

Occasionally, we are trained for work requiring more skill, like operating a two-stroke brush-cutter or driving a tractor.

Northward Hill and Cliffe Pools have such teams working mainly on Thursdays and Fridays. Our Thursday work force is relatively new, having started just over a year ago, whereas the Friday bunch have been going for over 15 years. With the guidance of our wardens, we, in the Thursday team, being new and enthusiastic, feel that we do more work and are much more particular, with our individual skills just bouncing off each other.

Obviously the Friday team, which consists of John Woodward and Frank Spooner from our Medway Group, will dispute that and they, being longer in the tooth and with more experience, would say they don’t need to work as hard!

You do not need any skills to become a volunteer, just some free time to give – and a sense of humour!!

Adrian Olsen

It was a chance meeting with Adam Rowlands, the then Assistant Warden, that led me to start as a volunteer at Elmley RSPB Reserve some seven or eight years ago. I must enjoy it as I am still there.

There was, and still is, some form filling to be done and a briefing on Health and Safety when you sign on as a volunteer, but as becoming a volunteer allows you onto parts of the reserve not open to visitors, it is not too onerous. I was given an explanation as to the objectives of the reserve, which basically are to maintain it as a grazing marsh. This enables the reserve to be both a place where waders such as lapwing and redshank breed and a winter refuge for wildfowl such as wigeon.

We [yes there are other volunteers] meet one day a week, usually on a Tuesday when the reserve is closed to visitors. Those, like myself, are day volunteers whilst others, normally two, are residential volunteers, but we all work together. This makes for an interesting mix of people from differing backgrounds.

What do we do? Basically things that are needed to keep the reserve in good order for the birds and the visitors. The Warden allocates these tasks to us as we sit drinking our morning cup of tea.

The jobs are varied, including maintaining and replacing fences and gates essential to keep the livestock in place.

The livestock [sheep and cattle] are themselves essential to ensure that the grass is kept at the right level for both the breeding birds and the wintering ones. Sometimes we get involved with moving the livestock, which can be both frustrating and amusing at the same time.

Track repairs feature quite often, yes we do try to keep the track in reasonable order, more so now that there is a facility for driving down to the reserve for those unable to walk all the way. The car park, footpath and bridge leading to the newest hide are good examples of the work we do, as is the screen attached to the hide and, indeed, the other hides.

Hide cleaning and picking up litter also feature on the list of jobs. A few other examples of the manual type of jobs include putting out straw to combat blue/green algae, pulling club rush from the scrape and brush cutting the vegetation. You are not expected to work beyond what you are comfortable with.

There are opportunities to be involved in survey work, of both birds and other inhabitants of the reserve, such as the coronids, which live in the mud and provide food for the birds. This particular survey is done by washing these creatures out of cores of mud samples taken from the scrape. The bird surveys include, or have included, both marsh harrier and lapwing monitoring.

I have found volunteering challenging, having to learn new skills such as hanging gates and putting up fences, whilst at the same time acquiring knowledge about birds, mammals, insects and plants, some of which is passed on from the other volunteers and some from the warden or assistant warden. There is also the opportunity to be trained in skills which would be useful as a volunteer and these include tractor driving and rush cutting.

If you are interested in becoming a volunteer then you should contact Sally Jennings who is the volunteer’s coordinator for the RSPBs North Kent Marshes Reserves. Sally can be contacted at Bromhey Farm telephone number 01634 222 480.

Robin West

We have discovered since commissioning these articles that Janet Keates volunteers on one day a month by walking round Northward Hill in the morning and Cliffe Pools in the afternoon, updating and cleaning notice boards, reporting damage, rubbish, overgrown footpaths etc for the work parties to deal with. Also meeting and talking to members of the public about the Reserves.