My husband Nick and I had been occasional visitors to the trust over the years, but we first became members when were on holiday and spent a couple of days in the park. On our second visit Ashley remembered that we had been earlier in the week and welcomed us back! It struck us that everyone was so friendly, they all seemed to love what they were doing and were very happy to talk to us.

Nick and Cathy

We started attending the working days, doing the usual jobs such as raking leaves and cleaning. We helped demolish old aviaries and construct new ones and on one occasion we spent the whole day shovelling gravel (40 tonnes if I remember correctly)!

We treated ourselves to an Activity Day and an ‘Owls by Torchlight’ evening and then just wanted to get more involved. Initially we did this by volunteering, mainly on bank holidays and since then on a more regular basis at weekends. We enjoy working outside, it’s so different from our ‘day jobs’ and when there’s a chance for a break, you can’t beat one of Gemma’s brownies and a mug of special hot chocolate!

We’ve done lots of different jobs around the park, from gift aid and membership, to cleaning water bowls, benches, and aviaries, not forgetting car park duty on busy days. One bank holiday we took sessions on owl identification and pellet dissection. The children seemed to love painstakingly teasing out even the smallest of bones from the pellets using tweezers and they were overjoyed on the occasions that a whole skull was revealed.

More recently we’ve been helping out behind the scenes and on activity days and we’ve loved every bit of it. We know there’s still a lot to learn but every time we visit we learn something new!

My friends wonder why am I so enthusiastic about getting up early on a frosty weekend, driving for an hour and working all day at the Hawk Conservancy! Well it’s hard to give a short answer, but last Sunday standing in the lower flying field watching Frodo (the Tawny Eagle) fly to the post, hearing him gurgle with contentment when he landed and seeing him looking so magnificent in the bright sunshine, I thought "‘you just can’t get better than this"!