“Women and Work has been a catalyst. I will be starting a new phase of my career thanks to this training. The course is called ‘Climbing and Aerial Rescue’ and it means I will be able to go up trees to carry out much more accurate surveys before the tree surgeons start their work.
Working in the South West we look particularly for protected species like bats and dormice and of course all birds are protected when they are nesting.
The job I am doing as an ecologist with Hi-Line is a new position and it’s growing, and I am growing with it. Hi-Line are very serious about training and the climbing course will give me more confidence. And I really enjoy going to work every single day!
It’s taken me some time to get where I am but I love this job. I left school and did a secretarial course in London, then took a number of jobs that didn’t involve being a secretary. I worked in factories, warehouses and delivering the post before becoming a pharmacy technician.
I was interested in ecology, so I started a part time degree in environmental conservation with Birkbeck College in London, originally thinking of it more as an interest than a career.
I thought there had to be more to life, I wanted to work in the fresh air and feel proud at the end of the day, so I got a job with Natural England, then called English Nature, in their London office. I gave people advice about bats and eventually took over from a very knowledgeable colleague who taught me a lot. I ended up liaising with the bat workers, the public, planners and developers. I also learned a lot about conservation and the legal aspects of the work, and Natural England ran lots of in-house training courses with their own experts.
Then in 2005 I wanted a total change. I moved to the West Country and got a trainee placement for nine months with the Kingfisher Project, which is funded by the European Social Fund, at the Devon Wildlife Trust near Exeter. They put me through various ‘tickets’ such as chain saw work, brush-cutter, first aid etcetera, and I took an NVQ2 in environmental conservation.
I loved the work but the placement finished and I couldn’t get a job so I volunteered for nearly a year with the National Trust at the Teign Valley in Devon. There I did more training in handling a wood chipper, 4x4 off road driving and small tree felling.
Then I approached Hi-Line’s MD and he took me on as a grounds person this May. He knew about my degree and past experience so I could do more on the ecology side, which is building all the time, partly because the legislation on protected species has been tightened up recently. Hi-Line have more and more contracts so there is more chance of their teams coming across protected species. If you cut down a tree that’s a bat roost you can get into serious trouble.
The idea is that I can advise the team before they go in and - if I need them - I have expert contacts to consult. The Climbing and Aerial Rescue training will mean that I can help more by climbing into the trees safely. Looking for bat roosts from the ground isn’t that easy! Inspecting more closely means I can do a more thorough survey.
You have to go quite high with a rope and harness and you have to know your knots. The training makes you use muscles you never knew you had, but it’s also great fun.
Thanks to Woman and Work I’ll climb trees and get fit, I’ll be much more efficient, providing better surveys and possibly get into doing more tree work. The next step would be cutting up the tree.
This training means there are different routes I could take in my career - moving to be a tree surgeon or the ecology route. That’s every exciting.
It’s lovely to go out with the teams and give them advice, talking to landowners and getting their permission to cut trees on their land. Every day is different and that’s great.
I am much more confident and happier in myself now, and probably healthier for being outdoors and active all the time. I’m feeling very positive about the future.
Hi-Line will benefit from me having a wider experience and being able to go up trees. They will get better information from my surveys and the feedback I’m getting on my reports is good. There’s also lots of potential for the ecology side of the business to become more established and expand.
The company is keen on training and now I’m passing on what I know to others. We have started putting a newsletter in with wage slips and I’ve written a couple on different protected species, so we’re educating people from the inside. We also have a new contract which will involve me doing a presentation to all the surveyors about protected species.
In the end, my work might also attract more women into the industry. They probably think of tree surgeons as big strong guys cutting bits off trees, but if you see what I am doing, it’s a very different job.”