Work Experience With IFLI

My name is Jayden Read.  I am a 15 year old boy in high school right now.  I live in Scotland in a small town called Tillicoultry with my parents, brother and sister.  In my spare time I’m usually laying around in my room or messing around with my friends.  We used to live around a lot of trees which I would climb a lot, this got me interested in things to do with the environment.  This was a big reason why I asked the Inner Forth Landscape Initiative, or IFLI for short, to take me in for a week of work experience.

I was given a timetable that showed what I was going to be doing throughout the week and the variety of activities I would be doing.

During my week of work experience I walked around the Gartmorn Dam to identify different species of bird which was very cold but worth it because now I have a lot more knowledge on different kinds of birds.  We wrote down where the different species of bird were on our map by using codes for the different birds.  We saw well over 20 different species during our walk around the dam.  It was a nice experience to see tons of different colors on different birds.

We also went to Bridgeness to clear some bushes to make the place more habitable for animals.  When we were there we made a little hedgehog den out of some sticks that turned out decent. 

I wrote about the robin and put the information on the IFLI site and found out some interesting information about it like that they are associated with Christmas because the postmen who gave out Christmas cards in Victorian Britain wore red clothes and got the nickname robin so the robin on the cards represent the postmen. 

We went to go open up the sluice at RSPB Skinflats but then realised that there was something stopping us from opening it so instead of doing that we went to some cameras that were set up to take pictures of the birds and got quite a lot of good pictures from it.

And on my last day we went to finish of a boardwalk at RSPB Black Devon Wetlands which has been a very long project and we also cut up some willow trees so we could use them to block off areas around a view point so nobody can disturb the animals on the other side.

All in all, it was a fun, interesting and cold experience, the team was very nice to me and I’m glad that I came here for my work experience.  It has given me a bigger idea of what I want to choose as a career for when I’m older.