RSPB Volunteering Placement (Dove Stone - Practical Conservation and/or Research & Monitoring)

Our volunteer placements help people gain the skills and experience needed to start a career in conservation and support you to get the role you want. You will get to meet new people, manage volunteer work parties, and while you're doing all of this, you are helping to save nature too.

We are looking for Placement Volunteers to help our Dove Stone Team deliver the exciting work that they are doing across the Reserve, including:

• Practical Conservation - from landscape-scale peatland restoration work, tree planting, to creating wildflower meadows

• Research & Monitoring - help to set-up and collect data from monitoring that looks at changes that the peat restoration work is having, including: hydro-logical monitoring - water table; vegetation surveys; peat formation/loss surveys; peat depth surveys; fixed-point photography; site surveys for dams, tree planting, etc; summer species monitoring - breeding waders, ring ouzel, dipper, butterflies, bumblebees, etc; disturbance & predators; GIS & data handling.

Placement Volunteers bring in a variety of ideas, experiences and energy into our teams, it's so much more than just getting work done; we want to hear from you if you feel like you have the motivation and passion to save nature.

What you will be doing as a Placement Volunteer will depend on your interests and aspirations along with the objectives of the Reserve in what we need to deliver, but generally your work will involve a variety of tasks in order to give you a wide variety of skills and experience. Placements are designed to support specific reserves or projects or functional teams, so the list is endless. However, the following will be the main focus for these roles:

• Practical habitat restoration
• Surveying and monitoring
• Reserve maintenance
• People engagement

Although these can be two separate roles, and you may want to focus on one, there will be opportunities to do both in some capacity, so whatever it is you are interested in, you will have the opportunity to take on multiple pieces of work in order to give you a broad range of experiences and opportunities to learn.

So what do you need?

• You will need to be able to commit to a minimum of two days per week (including some weekend days where needed) for three months
• Unfortunately at Dove Stone we do not have volunteer accommodation, so you will either need to be live fairly locally to the Reserve, or have access to accommodation nearby (please note the Reserve is over 4,000 ha in size, therefore we meet and work across ALL of the Reserve, not just the area around Dove Stone Reservoir).
• Preferable - have access to your own vehicle and have a full driving licence (for which you can claim a daily mileage rate of up-to 25 miles per day to /from work at a rate of £0.26 per mile, and claim additional mileage for travel around the reserve, or be able to use the reserve's vehicles).

So what skills do you need? The aim of our volunteer placements is to help build skills and to help people gain the experience necessary to help take steps towards a career, primarily in conservation. We are looking for individuals who are interested in saving nature and with the energy to learn. We are not looking for experts in conservation, or even people with lots of experience, if you are new to the sector, changing careers or looking for a new challenge, this could be for you. But, some desirable skills include:

• Basic IT skills
• Experience spending time outdoors in nature (especially in the uplands)
• Communication skills
• Planning and organisational skills

This role is suited to someone looking to change their career, or someone who is just starting out. If you want to work in nature conservation, placements are volunteering opportunities that are created around your needs as much as the needs of the RSPB. You will have a say in your own development, you can work with your line manager to develop the skills you need. You will learn all about how environmental charities work to save nature and start to figure out what are of work is most suited to you. You will be working as part of a wider team and will have the opportunity to work with lots of different people.