March blog from Shannon Rae, Heritage Trainee at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve

Spring is finally here! Though the weather sometimes seems to disagree. But the plants are sprouting and the leaves are renewing, the Communities and Wildlife team are busy organising sessions with the public once again. For me, the month consisted of planning and delivering my Forest School Sessions. I had to write notes and evaluate certain children after each session. It was a great experience, and my confidence in structuring and planning the activities vastly improved as the weeks went on. Some tasks we carried out were to build dens, make bug hotels, craft with clay, makes rafts, plant seeds and toast marshmallows on a fire. Now I need to finish my portfolio and achieve my Level 3 qualification. It’ll be great to use the skills I’ve learnt in other activities with children and adults alike. 

With Land Management I have been given some volunteer events to run. I led the monthly beach clean and began the annual job of checking the electric fence insulators. They can rust and erode over the year which can cause shorts in the voltage, reducing the current and efficacy of the fence. I am very eager for the responsibility and enjoy guiding the teams for the task. Both are important for their own reasons. The beach clean removes plastic and other waste materials that gets washed up (it’s always surprising how much can be picked up) and the fence needs to be maintained to ensure the birds on the reserve are protected from predation. 

During the fencing task I also found a very old porpoise skull that was way over the other side of the fence, metres from the sea. We theorise it either washed up and was dragged onto the far shingle, or was from when the sea was slightly more inland.

The Heritage Trainee role at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund