The cooler months of the year are some of the most enjoyable for me. It’s the time of the year when I feel more like being out in the bush rather than needing to find a beach to cool down. The flies, mosquitoes and hoppy joes seem to have gone into hibernation. Many of the rampant weeds like morning glory have slowed down and barely seem to be growing at all. It’s the time of year that feels most suited to the more physical removal of woody weeds like bitou bush, lantana and privet and the works carried out now can really set us up for the spring ahead.
With this in mind, I hope that you are all enjoying your time on your sites and that you are well and truly getting on top of specific issues. As always please be mindful of workplace health and safety. It can be tempting to get stuck into the physical work in the cooler conditions but it’s important to take time to warm up, stretch and make sure that you are not taking on something that is too challenging. It’s easy to overdo things and we don’t want to see our volunteers injured from pulling out a weed that is a bit too tough, lifting something that is too heavy, or just doing too much in a day and not resting up as needed.
Our program isn’t just about pulling out weeds and as always there is a great deal going on in the background to support what our Environmental Volunteers are doing on their sites. We are very busy in the lead-up to National Tree Day (30th July) and are well into planning for our end-of-year volunteer Christmas Party to be held at Central Coast Wetlands on Sunday 26th November - keep an eye on this space for official invitations!
We recently sent our volunteers some information about shirts, thank you to all who responded. Please don’t worry if you didn’t get to respond to us, the results that we received were enough to give us all the information needed to go ahead with our volunteer shirt designs and orders. Over the next few weeks, our supplier will be busy embroidering your shirts, once we have these in stock we will be in touch with information on how to get yours.
Why are we giving shirts to our Environmental Volunteers? A shirt will identify you to the public as an Environmental Volunteer, as well as provide something comfortable and practical to wear while you are out in our reserves doing your amazing environmental work. As you are working on your sites anyone who sees you will be able to recognise that you are part of Council’s Environmental Volunteer Program. You will be walking/talking advertisements for our program. What better way can we promote our program than by drawing attention to what you are doing on your sites? Many of our volunteers learned about the program after seeing volunteers working in the bush or the dunes and took the time to stop and ask them what they are doing and why? We hope that wearing the shirts opens up lots of opportunities for you to be seen within your communities and that it brings lots of interesting conversations with the public about who you are and why you are doing what you are doing as an Environmental Volunteer and of course encourage some of these people to join you.
We would love to be able to put out a future edition of the eNews with articles that have been put together entirely by volunteers within the program. This could be something like a history of your site and your achievements, or there could be a special feature of your site that you’d like to tell us about like the birds or frogs, the plant community, some historical features, etc. Or some other idea that I’ve not thought of at all?! Writing an article doesn’t need to be a daunting prospect, all we require is one page of text along with a couple of accompanying pictures. Just as I’d love to hear about your stories, I’m sure that the other volunteers within the program would too. Please send any future article ideas to us and we will be in touch environmentalvolunteering@centralcoast.nsw.gov.au
I’ve already mentioned National Tree Day. Carlita, along with Ben, has put together an article with much more information about the events that we are planning this year, ‘It’s a winter wonderland this National Tree Day!’ We hope that you are able to join us at one of our planting sites.
National Volunteer Week is a special week of the year to take time and acknowledge the amazing work of volunteers throughout our community. Carlita has also written this article about the bus trips that were organised to celebrate this important week in our calendars, ‘Mystery tour success for National Volunteer Week’.
The next article, ‘A community day at Phegans Bay’ was written by Ben, Carlita and Nick. This is about a recent promotional event that was organised by The Bays Bushcare at Phegans Bay. It’s great to have a group come up with an idea to promote themselves within their community and we were very happy to be able to support them in delivering their event.
Our final article in this eNews, ‘A pond for the Bell Frogs of North Avoca’, was written by Ben and Warren from Council’s Estuary Management Team. It’s a very interesting article about the creation of a pond that has been designed specifically to support a population of this threatened frog species.
We hope that you enjoy all of the articles in this edition. Happy and safe Environmental Volunteering to you all.
- Michael