Today is World Ranger Day, a chance for all of us to pause and appreciate the amazing work done on all our behalf’s by wildlife rangers everywhere. In many countries, rangers work in difficult and often dangerous conditions, for low pay, protecting, researching and interpreting wildlife for all. Many rangers looking after our most iconic species, such as elephants, gorillas, big cats etc, face huge tasks, personal danger and death in the course of duty- to all of them we say thank you!

It seems like a good moment for me, your SWT Perthshire Ranger to say a big thank you to our volunteer Assistant Ranger team, based here at Loch of the Lowes. I personally have five reserves to look after and many many species, not just Ospreys, and I could never achieve this huge remit without the help of this wonderful volunteer team. These folk give up their time (usually 3 months) to live and work here , assisting me and learning the skills they will need to go on to future careers in conservation. This team does  long hours of hard field work, helps monitor the ospreys, help run events and education visits, keep biological records and help visitors- an all round team!

So please join me in saying thank you to the 2012 team so far:

Thomas Plant, Laura Cunningham, Douglas Thomson, and Byran Turnbull ( March- June); and Ainoa Pravia,  Ben Bessant, Darko Ambrozic and Fraser Cormack. (June to September).

Some of these names might be familiar to you from their previous blog posts, and I am hoping to get each of the current team to do a blog from their point of view in the coming weeks- we hope you enjoy their insights.