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How about spending your volunteer holidays working on habitat conservation? These are definitely volunteer holidays where you need to roll up those sleeves, muck in, and have fun. You need to be fairly fit, too. But the rewarding bit is that you know you're helping to ensure the survival of fragmented habitats & the wildlife living there.
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Create hedges for British wildlife
Your efforts really can make a difference to the wildlife who depend on hedging for their food & shelter. Much of the UK's hedges have disappeared, so this is a great opportunity to give back to animals & create habitats for them.
This holiday also gives you a chance to learn the craft of hedge-laying, which differs from region to region, but which has long had an impact on the UK's landscape heritage. So you're not just helping the wildlife, who'll benefit from your endeavours after you've headed home - you'll also be keeping alive past traditions!
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Get stuck into wildlife habitat management
Over the centuries, nature & man have found ways of working together, and you can get involved in one of them. Get stuck into a variety of tasks, such as scrub clearance, haymaking & clearing poisonous plants such as ragwort, to enable livestock to get on with the job of managing (or eating) the land. Doing all this clearing up means that local wildlife won't be thrown by the establishment of more competitive species coming along to the area. The livestock keep the balance of nature in hand - but they need clear spaces to do it. And you can provide that initial clearance, before letting the livestock in to graze.
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Conserve Cornwall's coast & wildlife
Cornwall is a beautiful county, and here's your chance to contribute towards its coastal conservation. This is a week of litter collection/surveying & education. The litter you collect will be surveyed & the data fed to the Marine Conservation Society. This helps add to underestanding where litter comes from & how it affects fragile ecosystems. You'll learn quite a bit about Cornish wildlife, as there will be visits by & talks from those involved protecting the coastline, including the National Seal Sanctuary. And of course there'll be plenty of fun & laughter too! More... |
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Help out with woodland management
British woodlands have been managed for centuries - it's one of the reasons why they thrived for so long. This is your opportunity to help British woodland, after so much of it was destroyed in the last century; & it's a great opportunity to find out what "coppicing" really is all about (in short, felling areas of woodland in rotation).
You may find yourself helping with tree planting, coppice management, woodland crafts, or rhodedendron clearance in some of the most spectacular & peaceful areas of the UK - perfect for lending a hand & giving back homes to all those wildlife who depend on woodland for food, shelter, nesting & breeding grounds. Find out about this opportunity to volunteer here - or find out more about woodlands & ways to help here |
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Get your wellies on and help with wetlands
Wetlands matter, although they're often glossed over by the public as wastelands. But they are home to many species, including the little water vole. And you could help protect these habitats & wildlife there, clearing ponds for instance & brambles.
Much of the work is done on land owned by charities such as the National Trust & Wildlife Trusts, so you may well find yourself assisting these organisations in achieving their goals to protect & restore the envrionment. It depends on where you are and the work that needs doing. Find out more by going to Responsible Travel's site here
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Plant a tree or two in Scotland
Scotland has some staggeringly beautiful conservation volunteering opportunities and here's one that's really breathtaking.
Would you like to play your part in forest conservation, in a goal to plant 250,000 trees, as part of the UN Environment Protection's aim to plant 7 BILLION trees worldwide by the end of 2010? Then head up to Scotland to help with any number of tasks....tree planting, seed collecting, removing non-native plants, removing old fences & tree nursery work. What you do depends on the location! Find out more about it here |
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Celebrate!
Celebrate a good job done with a group of new friends! & plan your next trip - could it be that you head off somewhere else?
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