It is a privilege and honour to work with young people who care so passionately for the local environment and are doing their part to help out.  Over the last few months we have done some removal of invasive species – including bracken pulling at Cooper’s Hill and ragwort pulling both at our Totternhoe Reserve and most recently for Flitwick Town Council at Flitwick Manor Park. We saw several cinnabar moth caterpillars whilst working so left those plants for them to kindly ‘remove’ for us.

Most recently the Bedfordshire Youth Rangers spent a morning spreading 'green hay' in the south Paddock at Blow's Down. The hay was cut from our wildflower-rich meadow the previous week. Spreading the cut hay across the paddocks will hopefully result in increasing the diversity of wildflowers here too. We'll look forward to seeing what shoots up there next year. 

The hours spent discovering our local nature reserves and taking part in practical conservation are counted each time and go towards John Muir Awards.  At our most recent session four of our Youth Rangers received their first Discovery Award Certificates – well done and thank you!

While it has been a busy summer for the Bedfordshire Youth Rangers we are also excited to announce that there is a newly formed Luton group of Youth Rangers. If you are or know of a young person of secondary school age (11-18) who has a keen interest in wildlife and would like to make a difference in their local area please contact Matt.Sutcliffe@wildlifebcn.org (Luton) or Sarah.cowling@wildlifebcn.org (Bedfordshire) for more details.

The dates for upcoming sessions will be released shortly.

In the meantime you can find out more about Youth Rangers here: Youth Rangers | Wildlife Trust for Beds, Cambs & Northants (wildlifebcn.org). 

Thank you, Sarah