Be More Ranger: Sun 28th April 2024
Meeting up with veteran (and new) National Park Rangers. Plus swifts, nature reserves, marshy parks & help for our Friends groups.
Morning. Some shorter pieces today, including a call out for organisers, website builders, administrators and Swift mappers among our thousands of readers. And some old and new views of rangering in the Peak District. We all need to be a bit more ranger, I’m told. Find out what that means below.
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Swift Arrivals
The first sightings of this year’s Swifts are coming in, and this year there’s a new map to keep track of where they are and where they might be going, set up by Fiona Tomlin and Ian Cracknell of Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust.
“Swifts are in trouble, now red listed due to habitat and population declines,” Nicky Rivers from SRWT tells me. “But so many individuals and groups in Sheffield have raised the profile of the plight of Swifts, and taken action to help, that collectively we have self-declared Sheffield to be a Swift city.”
She says SRWT have put the new Sheffield Swift Map together with partners from Sheffield Swift Network, RSPB, Sheffield Bird Study Group and Sheffield Biological Records Centre to collate data to help understand how Swifts are doing in Sheffield.
“We hope that people will be inspired to get involved in collecting more monitoring data, join a local swift group or fill gaps by starting a new group or creating new roosting sites for Swifts.” Swifts are just starting to arrive here from Africa, so she hopes the map will kick-start the 2024 Swift season in Sheffield.
Chet Cunago from Sheffield Swift Network adds: “Swifts are a completely nest faithful, building-dependent species. Once so commonplace in Sheffield no-one ever thought to record their numbers in the past. The Sheffield Swift City Map will help us gauge where to concentrate future nest provision and protect nests, and will be a fantastic tool for roofers, builders, and developers to access.”
Sightings of Swifts and their nests are desperately needed, Chet says, so use the map or contact the network at:
https://sheffieldswiftnetwork.org/ive-spotted-a-swift-nest/
Friends Help
Local volunteers are doing a lot more than simply helping to keeping our parks tidy these days. In Meersbrook Park, a grateful officer from the council’s ecology team showed me how members of the Meersbrook Park Users Trust are helping the council slow the flow of water into the Sheaf and prevent soil erosion by bringing one of the small brooks gushing down the park hillside back to life.
A dead hedge is protecting the soil around the brook so waterside plants will grow back after years of erosion to hold the soil out of the brook and provide food and homes for insects, birds and amphibians.
I gather there might also be a new meadow coming at the top of the park, and perhaps a new pathway over the top of the brook so locals can picnic and one day watch frogs and butterflies passing by.
Similar forward - looking work is going on around the city, thanks to upwards of 100 volunteer groups, working with the council’s resource-strapped parks and countryside team. The groups are linked through the city’s Green Spaces Forum, whose voluntary chair Ted Talbot tells me the forum is desperately in need of people with a bit of time on their hands to help provide administrative and communications support. Maybe just a day or two a month, he pleads.
Could this be you, or someone you know? If you have fundraising skills too, all the better. Contact Sheffield Green Spaces Forum at: N.Dempsey@sheffield.ac.uk
Pond Life
We recently reported the appeal to raise £20,000 in a week for two of the city’s oldest urban nature reserves, managed by Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust. That’s ambitious, I thought, even with match funding from the Big Give charity. Well, they raised £20,300 in just seven days thanks to over 80 generous local donors, and SRWT will start work on Sunnybank (Broomhall) and Crabtree Pond (Pitsmoor) this year.
“Smaller urban nature reserves are vital pockets of habitat for wildlife in built up areas, and they're also a sanctuary for people to get away from the noise and busy-ness of the city, and connect with nature, which we know is hugely beneficial for wellbeing,” said Paul Hodges from SRWT.
His colleague Paul Jarman said: “At Sunnybank the focus will be renovating the pond and it's surroundings, and at Crabtree there will be a new pond dipping platform, and step and path improvements to offer a circular walk around the pond.”
The money will also help woodland and meadow management at both reserves. If you’d like to help with this work, email SRWT at: volunteering@wildsheffield.com or see their volunteering page.
Be More Ranger
There’s more than one way to go about challenging someone unknowingly about to set fire to hundreds of acres of moorland.
“You sort of walk up and say, ‘Hello there!’ first of all,” says Shelia McHale, and adds having a smile on your face helps too. “I’ll then say I’m a National Park ranger, and I don’t know if you’re aware, it’s no barbecues here, especially this time of year, that’s how I’d start to engage. And if they asked why, I’d then tell them about the fire risk, and how sparks could blow onto the dry moor even if you could clear everything away.”
Despite the smile, there’s a look in Sheila’s eye that tells me that few would argue.
On the 16th April, dozens of current and past rangers gathered in Edale to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Peak National Park ranger service (called wardens when the patrols first launched in 1954).
Some of those first volunteer wardens were former services personnel, Sheila learned from her own conversations with older rangers when she joined the service in the 1980s. In last week’s post I covered the story of Gordon Miller, a.k.a. Gordon the Warden, who was an inspiration to many in the ranger service across the world, but he also had his stern side, as observed by reader Richard last week.
The talk at Edale was all about engagement rather than enforcement. Rangers say if you talk nicely and explain how fires can start from sparks or from left behind barbecues, glass bottles and cigarettes, and how the ‘keep dogs on leads’ directive between March and August is to protect rare ground nesting birds, not just sheep and livestock, most members of the public tend to understand, and do what you’re asking.
The old photo of those first wardens depicts a row of middle-aged tweeded gentlemen ‘engaging’ with prospective volunteers under a chilly Edale sky. Current ranger team leader Jess Coatesworth tells me the role hasn’t changed, in many ways.
“We still have visitors, we still have people living here, that’s not changed, but our work with schools and education is much more important now. Because nature is only declining, our role is getting people engaged with nature and loving nature again.”
I meet Margaret Black before she heads off on one of the day’s walks over the hills. She’s been a volunteer ranger for 29 years, and is still volunteering at the age of 87.
“Why do I do it? Because I love the countryside, I love the people, I love doing stuff to help it keep going,” she says. “But nowadays the service is short of money, just when it’s vitally important because of the health of the nation, all that research that’s been done about how good it is for people to be out in the open air. But you can’t get that without spending some money on it, it’s impossible. You can put on guided walks, but to do that you have to take people away from repairing walls or footpaths, you can’t do everything.”
The Peak District staff tell me there were 120 part and full time employed wardens looking after the park in 1963, along with volunteers, and now there are just 27, supported by a 200 strong network of volunteer rangers.
Many of the rangers in Edale, like Margaret, were inspired by their love of the countryside. Adrian Earp has been visiting from being a teenager, and became a volunteer ranger after being caught out in a blizzard in his fifties.
“It was February in a blinding snowstorm and out of the snow came a lady walking with a dog. She was a ranger from Edale and she’d been on a walk over from Fairholmes, and she just came over to see if I was okay really. So we started talking and I thought well then, I’ll train up to become a volunteer.”
When Sheila McHale became a ranger over 30 years ago, employed women rangers were few and far between.
“You felt you had to prove you were able to keep up. You need fitness in this landscape and the weather, you need to be quite happy in it. I was one of the first women to work on the path maintenance team, laying paths across the moors and I liked being part of those changes. I was quite strong, and we developed ways of literally forging new ground with these stone paths, working out how to manoeuvre these quarter ton slabs.”
She also talks about days rescuing climbers, and the terrible occasion she was called in to check a man who’d committed suicide in his car, found by walkers. But the days she enjoys most are those times that Adrian remembers, when she starts chatting to walkers who might be lost, or just need some advice coming down from the moors.
Rangering is about explaining, engaging, and understanding, I’m told, particularly in the Peak District which, unlike some other national parks, staff say really does attract visitors from all walks of life and backgrounds from the surrounding cities.
“The service definitely needs investment,” says Jess Coatesworth. “But for me it’s not just about what rangers can do, it’s what we can all do. We all need to be more ambitious, I think. These days, people sometimes don’t feel as comfortable in the countryside, or maybe don’t quite feel the same ownership as those days when we fought for access, and I think we take it a lot for granted, and we should love it a bit more. There’s a phrase I hear that everyone should be a bit more ranger. I think the government should take that on board too.”
Selected What’s On Out There (from Sun 28th April)
See our full listings service here. It’s updated every few days. Think of all those hours I put in to save your browsing and faffing time. Appreciation button below.
Sun 28th - Sheffield Conservation Volunteers work at Sheffield General Cemetery
Mon 29th - Graves Park Digging Deeper For All - Creating and Managing Habitats talk (Lees Hall golf club)
Tues 30th Sheffield Ramblers Walk - Gleadless & Woodseats Bluebell Walk (5.5m - meet Cathedral Tram Stop)
Weds 1st May - Social Walk from Longshaw (5m)
Thurs 2nd - SRWT Volunteer Day- Moss Valley Woodlands
Thurs 2nd - Graves Park Digging Deeper For All - Recording Birds Walk (Meet Rose Garden Cafe)
Fri 3rd - Cemetery Sessions with Liz Hanks & Pelfkin (General Cemetery - £12)
Sat 4th - Sun19th - Wadsley & Loxley Common BioBlitz events
Sat 4th - Ranger Led Conservation Morning, Wardsend Cemetery
Sat 4th - Bluebell and Wildflower walk in Ecclesall Woods
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Thank you for this… I’m sat at home with some sore throat & coughing lurgy. Reading this just cheered me up.. just thinking about the outdoors makes a difference!
It all needs to be a bit more contextualised though. Any ranger warning people about fire hazard at the moment after the wet Spring we've just had will be laughed off the moors.