The Park Rangers

Make sure your volume is on: "Balancing conservation with recreation"

Show transcript

It’s a very varied job, so we have to have skills in many different areas. We are basically trying to balance conservation with recreation…so we welcome the public into the park. So we have to upkeep all the public stuff like the bins, the benches, grass cutting, play areas, stuff like that. Conservation is when we have more wild areas where we don’t keep the public out, but we tend to not advertise it as a place to go.

Another facet of our job is that we have a duty of care over everyone who comes into the park, so that we have to ensure that paths are maintained properly, there’re not dangerous for people with mobility issues, and that our trees are all properly inspected. Normally daily when we do our rounds we check all the paths and see if any of the trees have any obvious issues, which we would then tackle as soon as we can. And just generally try to keep an eye out and see if there is anything that could harm any of the people we invite into the park.

We are also super interested in the conservation of the species that we have here on site. We do a lot of species surveys to monitor the numbers that we have on site, such as a our reptile transects. I’ve got a volunteer doing bird surveys currently. And we’ve got ‘Bio Blitz’ coming up at some point in the future, which has been put back due to COVID. [What is a Bio Blitz?] A Bio Blitz is when we do 24 hours of surveying, and we have experts on site, professionals in mosses and bugs and birds and everything you can imagine. And everyone gets together to record every species that we have on site, and it is really exciting. It gives us a list of things that we might not have known were here, if we have got some rare species that we might not know about, like small mosses and interesting things like that [rare earthworm types].

We do a lot of grazing. And we don’t graze traditionally for food intake for livestock to be sold on, not to use in another product. They are purely here to … a lot of it is winter grazing … and it is just to eat the grass down to a certain point so that all the flowers and species and young tree saplings don’t have to compete with lots of long grass to grow up. These obviously benefit a lot of insects. Like Laura is saying, Thicket Lawn is a huge benefit to our butterflies – it is one of the places which has the most butterflies that we have. The brilliant thing about using animals is that if we went in and cut, it would have a very similar effect, but as humans we are quite logical (even if we don’t think we think like a logical person) but animals are so natural in the way that they might just want to eat over here or eat over there. There’s no physical thought process behind it – they just do it! So you get the best effect by using grazing animals.