Dear Dan,
Firstly thanks for your patience. As you may be aware I have only been in post for 3 months and so I wanted to ensure I had talked to the team members involved before replying.
Its great to have people who care about our reserves and our wildlife, and I am pleased that you came to us with your views and opinions.
All our reserves are managed through a small team of reserves officers, who each look after around 10 sites and who all work very hard to manage our reserves according to detailed 5 year management plans. We are a charity with limited resources, and a charity very dependent on the support and help of our members and volunteers as well as the dedication and passion of our staff team. We work with volunteers and volunteer teams to deliver much of the practical work on reserves. We also rely heavily on grant funding to fund much of the work identified within these plans. We are not funding led – we use some of the various grants available, where appropriate, to deliver the work which we have agreed through our 5 year strategic plan and annual business planning processes. The lack of resources frustrates the reserves staff as much as yourselves and we constantly stretch our resources as far as we can to ensure we get maximum biodiversity gain.
With this in mind, we are always keen to get feedback from our visitors as we don’t have the time to be on every site every day; we rely on our visitors to act as our day to day “eyes and ears” to let us know of problems as well as wildlife sightings. When issues are reported to us, for example the hedge at Wyver Lane (which was put in a few years ago to provide screening) becoming overgrown and obstructing views, we can usually put things right.
We have an email address for the organisation;
[email protected]. Any problems or issues should be sent to this address so that they can be passed on to the correct person for action. If action is not appropriate we can then explain why. Conservation is a tricky balance and often the views and desires of one set of visitors or volunteers is in direct opposition to another audience or the overall management plans for the site. Therefore we can’t please everybody all of the time, but we do try to accommodate as many ideas and opinions as possible.
Grazing is an essential part of managing wildlife rich sites. It is interesting to hear the comments about Woodside. In addition to a wildlife-rich countryside, conservation grazing can deliver substantial benefits to local communities. Local production of good quality meat and dairy produce with high welfare standards is a key outcome for our conservation grazing. Visitors to grazed sites with public access often enjoy watching free-ranging animals, and in some cases enjoy becoming involved as voluntary stock checkers, helping to keep an eye on livestock. So conservation grazing is not just optimized biodiversity, but looking forward to ways in which sustainable management of the countryside will benefit both the wildlife and the communities who live there. At Woodside, over time, we aim to demonstrate these benefits and encourage the local community to gain a better understanding of where there food comes from and the impacts of intensive farming on wildlife.
Thanks again for taking the time to get in touch, and please do encourage members of the forum to feed in their comments directly via the address above in future.
Kind regards,
Jo
Dr. Jo Smith
Chief Executive
Derbyshire Wildlife Trust
The point I was trying to make was the spectrum of ages and contributions by the 'Upton' Crew for the common good is something ALL the Wildlife Trusts/ Voluntary Organisations should aspire to.
