With everyone gearing up for hopefully another busy year, we offered some of our volunteer roles some training to help them support us.
Our Host Volunteers have been recruited to assist the Education Team with events and activities. They gathered for a full day of training, led by Education Officer Susan. The day started with a Guided Walk - this is something we already offer for pre-booked groups but Susan is keen to offer this during peak times for walk in visitors. A Guided Walk usually lasts about an hour, and can cover a specific topic, such as habitats, conservation or Owls. Alternatively, the Guide can ask the visitors which species they would like to learn more about. As such, it was important to cover all of our birds, so the training Guided Walk took about two and a half hours. During this time, Susan shared plenty of fun facts about the species we hold, the individual personalities of some of the birds and some personal stories. This combination seems to work well, and the volunteers received access to our species fact sheets at the end of the training so that they can go and do their own research.
After lunch, Susan allowed the volunteers to take part in our popular Pellet Detectives activity. This is usually run as a table-top activity when we attend events out in the community. The volunteers delved in and became just as engrossed in this activity as the children who usually participate. Susan demonstrated how to use the guides to identify the type of bone found, as well as the species it came from. She also shared some top tips on answering likely questions, such as where to find pellets and how to emphasise that it isn’t poo!
The day ended with an ideas sharing discussion from the volunteers on other ways we can raise awareness about SOS, and fundraising ideas.
Our Owlreach Volunteers were also offered a couple of training sessions run by Susan and Dolly, who runs our Raptor Hospital. These sessions covered handling, transporting and releasing protocols, as well as guidance on how to minimise risks to volunteers and birds. Dolly gave a demonstration on how to safely capture and contain a bird of prey, pointing out that the feet are the biggest risk and that if you can get close enough to throw a towel over the bird, it needs help! We also emphasised that birds do not need to be given any food or water, as this can cause more harm than good if given the wrong thing. There was opportunity for the volunteers to ask questions, which did raise some interesting discussion regarding health concerns and safe retrieval of birds.
We have recently changed some of our guidelines so the sessions gave us an opportunity to update the volunteers with our new guidelines.
The session ended with a tour of our Raptor Hospital and Dolly was able to give an explanation on what goes on once a bird is brought in to us. Susan then briefly explained the importance of ringing birds, and how combining our Hospital work with nest box monitoring is proving successful by recapturing released birds in the boxes.