From Watering to Webmaster

Fifteen years in the life of a volunteer

I am an impatient, and some would say intolerant, soul. That might explain why, back in 1991, or maybe it was 1990 – I can’t remember – I decided I could no longer put up with pussyfooting around the house until what seemed like nearly lunchtime every Saturday, simply because the rest of the family liked to lie in and I didn’t. We had recently joined as members of The Hawk Conservancy and, at our first members’ evening, I asked Ashley if there was any way he could use me on Saturday mornings, to get me out of the house. Ashley said I could join Ian Hiscock (remember him – the guy with the green TR7 and a penchant for TA/military stories) on the water round. Ian had started a few weeks previously.

I had no objections to this from the family who, in all probability, were becoming as tired of what they saw as my attempts to wake them as I was of having to do a regular impression of a church mouse (something about creeping into the crypt, but we won’t go into that).

So I started and, for about three years, that and the feed round was all I did. The feed round was a special time for me, as it put me in close contact with Reg every week and during that time I developed a respect and fondness for Reg that was surpassed only by that for my own father. Sadly, neither of these gentlemen is now with us. Wintertime was very special in those days – not so much the lifting of ice off the bowls and ponds, but coffee break with Reg and Hilary in the bungalow, banter flying between Ashley, Harold and Eddie and some fine storytelling from Ashley that had us in stitches.

Anyway, as jobs go, watering around was not bad, not bad at all. It put me in every aviary on the park every week, and meant that I got up close to every species. Some, like the ravens, were a bit of a challenge at times. Some, like the Milky Eagle Owls and the odd Redtail could be a tad scary; but mostly I found the birds to be so much nicer than some of the people I have had to deal with. I’m not going to mention any names, but I have, during the last 15 years, seen a few falconers and a lot of volunteers come and go.

I once asked Ashley whether he thought I should do a falconry course, but he said that I would learn as much if not more during my everyday (or every week) work at the park. He was right. After three years I must have become a local authority on scrubbing ponds and bowls with just the right amount of hypochlorite and, with one notable exception, climbing in and out of aviaries without letting the occupants out.

Then, one day, Ashley offered to teach me the falconers’ knot. Forty-five minutes he spent trying to get his knowledge to pass through the ivory barrier that I call my skull. In the end he gave up, and told me to get a book out of the library. That I did, and was tying the knot in five minutes. For almost a week every fixed object in my house had string, wool, twine – anything tied to it in a falconers’ knot. I think that just reinforced that my preferred style of learning is through books. Shortly after that, I was given the great honour of manning and subsequently training (under close supervision) a new Harris’ Hawk called Clare. What a brilliant bird. Eight days from first manning she was flying free and I handed her over to the professionals to fit her for the winter hunting team.

Kerry as a youngster

Flushed with that success, my next task was Kerry, a male bird from the same clutch as Clare. Kerry had spent his early days in an aviary on public view, to get him used to seeing large numbers of humans. He was, however, still a very nervous bird. He was so jumpy that as soon as his equipment was attached, he pulled away from the perch with such force that he broke a leg. When he was eventually ready for training, he was a nightmare! To cut a very long story short, what I achieved in eight days with Clare took eighteen months with Kerry. In fairness, he wasn’t helped by a particular falconer (who, for a number of reasons, I shall not name) who cast Imperial Eagle Spartacus into the meadow whilst I was working Kerry on following on around the hedgerow. Spartacus passed within about six feet of Kerry, and the poor wee lad suffered what I can only think of as a nervous breakdown.

I turned up at the park for Kerry’s training every evening at about 5pm. In wet weather I would carry him and walk with him for a bit, and in dry weather we would enjoy an hour’s flying. I lost count of the number of times I was still there at 8pm, calling, asking, cajoling and even begging him to come out of a tree. His particular joy was, in windy weather, to fly to the very top of the flimsiest looking tree he could find, grip on with his feet and wrap his wings around it for stability and not know what to do next. In fairness, all he had to help him was wings – what is a bird to do?

His hunting prowess was beyond question. In his first year he successfully bagged out of trees two fir cones and an apple. Oh yes, and a young Sparrow that took a bath in his bowl – although I rather think he fell on that by mistake!

Kerry sunbathing

Eventually, though, he got the message and, after spending a winter in a group aviary with others of his kind, learned his place in the great scheme of things and hasn’t looked back since. Now an Activity Day bird, he is, to my mind, amongst the most reliable. Don’t ask him to fly in the rain, though – oh, and if the sun shines, don’t be surprised if you see him spread-eagled (or spread-Harrised?) on the grass taking some rays. I have no idea where he got those tricks from.

As an occasional Activity Day host I still keep in contact with Kerry although, as any of the staff will tell you, I most definitely do not have a favourite bird!!

Once Kerry was taken into the team I started, during the winter months, to fly Mica, an aging female Red-tailed Hawk. Boy, did she ever teach me a few things.

Tysca minus equipment

A thorough hater of human females, children and, shall we say, softly spoken men (there were one or two women with whom she was comfortable, but we won’t delve into that), she had a way of punishing me for every mistake I made. She had been flown by the best for a lot of years, and she was not about to put up with amateurs. We had a few good seasons together, and she eventually came to live with me, about which more later. During that time I also trained up for release a buzzard that had been raised by a pair of Black Kites (Tysca). She was a dream to train, and got me my first mention in the local paper!

Meanwhile, we had been given a couple of old computers, and we decided to use them as educational tools. I wrote a simple text quiz programme that went onto two machines, both of which have been replaced a few times, and the programme is still available now, well over ten years later. We were also given a very high-spec computer as a donation and for this I prepared a simple multimedia presentation which is still in use in the education centre.

On 11 September 1996 a new arrival hatched on the World Wide Web. Going under the name of http://www.redtail.demon.co.uk/hawkcons/ it ran to half a dozen simple pages. Right from the start was a feature called the Bird of the Month. Each month a different species was featured. The detail, photographs and sound files were mostly home made – copied and amended from the multimedia dataset in the Education Centre and reworked into HTML, setting a new standard by plagiarising my own work! Because of the small amount of disk space available to me on Demon’s server, the Bird of the Month page was overwritten each month. By the end of 1996 I succumbed to pressure to make the feature weekly rather than monthly. Those were heady days. Some weeks we had up to 30 visitors!

In 1998, I was (with my day job hat on) negotiating with DartNet (since taken over by 4thWave, now iZR Solutions) for the provision of a web site. They didn’t get the job, but their salesman did want to sponsor the Hawk Conservancy web site, with free hosting. The only condition was that all previously featured birds should remain on the site and be permanently accessible. That was a challenge. I had figured that, with more than 60 species on the Park, I could recycle the species when I ran out. That possibility was gone. Mind you, when we relocated to their server, we acquired the name http://www.hawk-conservancy.org which was much more prestigious. And by that time we were looking at 30 visitors per day!

We are currently enjoying well over 20,000 visitors per month during school term time – that’s up to about 800 per day. We are listed in many directories of educational, zoological and conservational web sites. The BBC Good Web Guide has always had some nice things to say about us. Search engines are very important, as most of our visitors come through that route. We usually rank quite well on the search engines partly because of the well-targeted way in which we submit to them but also, increasingly, because of the number and stature of web sites that link to us. We are referenced by such sites as the BBC, the US StudyWeb, National Geographic and, although I haven’t found the link yet, MSN Encarta. 27% of visitors are referred from other sites.

The photographic competitions that we ran for a few years were very successful, and we now have a large number of very high quality images that are available for our use. I still receive photographs on a regular basis, although many of these are to support requests for species identification.

The web activity is now of great importance to the work of the Trust. Apart from being the international face of the Trust the new online ticket shop that we set up in time for Christmas has proven to be extremely popular, and is now an important source of revenue.

The presentation me, Ashley and Annette

In 2002, at the June members’ evening, I was greatly honoured by being given, along with Annette Hardy, the award as Volunteer of the Year. One day I guess I’ll find out what I did to deserve that – meantime, it has and will have pride of place on my mantelpiece.

Oh yes, I was on the South Africa trip with Andy, Mike and Jon last October, but I think that will need to be the subject of another piece.

Things will change over the next couple of months. Mrs Webmaster and I shall be moving to France before the summer and, at present, it isn’t clear when our house will benefit from Broadband. When it does, I can continue with my work for the Trust from there. If not straight away, we shall need to have a rethink. We are fortunate in that we can call on another volunteer to help with much of the work – but I shan’t want to be receiving emails with large photograph attachments over a dial-up connection!

Meantime, if anyone can think of a suitable name for a renovated farmhouse set at 1800 ft altitude in the Central Massif, please let me know (webmaster@hawk-conservancy.org).