I discovered the Hawk Conservancy on 1st March 1990, the opening day of the season and I was hooked! The flying demonstrations were wonderful and the friendliness of everyone I met made me feel part of the place at once. I had a full time job, so could only visit occasionally, but I came to help on members’ creosoting days, and after being made redundant in 1994 (yippee!) I did a few days volunteering at the Park, staying overnight in a local B & B, and decided that this was definitely something I wanted to do.

I spent 1995-6 doing a full time National Certificate course on Practical Habitat Management at Merrist Wood College, and then asked Ashley if I could become a regular volunteer.

Young Black Vultures Out To Play

The main drawback was the 93-mile round trip from my home in Surrey, but I took the plunge and started to come down for one day each week, beginning with jobs such as picking up litter, scrubbing aviaries, gardening & cleaning the loos. I had some previous experience of handling birds of prey through a local rescue group in Surrey, so I also helped with the Holding Birds after demonstrations and took young birds out to sit on the ground in the picnic area during lunch times. These included some of the black vulture babies and a very young Cheyenne, the bald eagle, who fitted neatly into a large basket and was very popular with the visitors. Most of my lunch break was spent trying to keep these youngsters on a blanket and to prevent them eating the wood chippings!

Pond Life in Waders!

Volunteering was never dull, with a wide variety of jobs, including clearing weed from the pond, shovelling up horse manure in the paddock, pruning trees and racing ferrets, and despite often being cold, wet and dirty, especially in the winter closed season, it has always been fun.

Tree Pruning

Eventually the great day came when I was asked to help behind the scenes in some of the flying demonstrations. I was very nervous and made quite a few mistakes at first…..thankfully most of them out of sight of the public! I’ve opened the door to an empty corridor between aviaries and waited for birds that weren’t there to come out, had two turkey vultures land on my head because I knelt down instead of standing when calling them in and they didn’t know what to do, and I once kept Chestnut the tawny owl flying back and forth across the front of the audience for several minutes while I tried to work out how to open his box…..the list goes on, but gradually I found out what to do and started to get things right!
One of my favourite jobs has been calling the black vultures up to the mound during demonstrations…..one of my least favourite was getting Figaro the Brahminy Kite in and out of his aviary, as he would mug you mercilessly for food and you were likely to come away with battle scars! Protective clothing in the form of cap, sunglasses and long sleeves was required!

Monica With Marmite

For the last three or four years I have worked mainly on Activity Days, very enjoyable as it has given me the chance to work directly with visiting guests and the privilege of handling birds such as Mowgli the Bateleur Eagle and Frodo the Tawny Eagle. I had an enforced eight-month absence after falling off my garage roof in 2003 (oops!) and breaking my femur, eventually returning on crutches and hobbling around inviting sympathy until I was fully mobile again, though now I have a metal pin in my leg and am not quite as agile as before.

Brigid Campbell and I have taken on the job of surveying Reg’s Meadow on a regular basis and this includes producing the Meadow web page for this site each month. The meadow is a wonderful place to spend time and we get great pleasure out of the task.

Since my husband took early retirement we have been travelling a lot more and I don’t get down to work quite as often. There have been many changes at the Hawk Conservancy during the 16 years I have been coming here and the 93-mile round trip remains a nuisance, but I still get the same buzz of excitement every time I come through the gate to work for the day. I don’t think that will ever change.