The Park Rangers

Make sure your volume is on: "Coffee, colleagues and cake..."

Show transcript

A good day is when we plan a job and we actually achieve it, which is actually quite rare. It’s just with everything else going on, isn’t it? You always get called off – an animal’s got out, or someone has fallen over or something, but occasionally we plan a job and it all comes together and the volunteers help us and we finish it so that is a good day.

My good day is when you’ve got a big group of volunteers and you’ve got a big task and everyone works as a team and you just power through it and get it done. And you can see what you’ve achieved and you can have coffee and cake while you’re achieving it. A good day!

Bad days…well we do a fair bit of lone working, and sometimes we can be pulled all over the place – say animals get out [water troughs are broken] Things are broken, people get injured, and you just can’t be everywhere at once. Yeah, that can be fun.

We haven’t been dealing with it so much recently but sometimes you get a bit of vandalism as well, and that is always disheartening. So maybe you have just put up a fence to keep mountain bikers out of a particular area, or motorbikes from going in and tearing up a field with loads of sheep in it, and you come back and it will have been torn open and someone will have got in. And that’s always very disheartening because you have spent so much…when you work on a site like this you put yourself in the site, so when someone disrespects it, it does get to you. So having that really does ruin your day almost.

Our sites are like an extension of our back gardens. So whenever anyone does anything you are a little bit like, “Would I come into your garden and do that? No I wouldn’t! Please don’t!”