Member Article

Amazing volunteers help building take shape

One year ago this week Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s Wildlife Discovery Centre on its Hauxley reserve at Druridge Bay began and just look what an army of volunteers have achieved in the subsequent 12 months.

And it’s all been made possible by the £400,000 received from the Heritage Lottery Fund and support from National Lottery players for the wildlife charity’s Dynamic Druridge project.

Although the wonderful building is the most visible hive of activity on the Hauxley site, it’s not just that which is keeping the volunteers busy as they are working on numerous other tasks on the reserve such as managing the land extension and the creation of the new circular walk and new wetland habitat around the revamped outflow.

But all this would never have been possible without the army of hard working and dedicated volunteers who have given up their own valuable time to build the new centre, with a number of volunteers turning up four or five days a week! The project now has over 100 people.

And talk about ‘Grey Power’… some 90% of the regular building volunteer group (around 20 people) have retired from work, and of the other builders, about 60% of them are over 65 years of age. The oldest volunteer is 84 and turns up every Friday to work on reserves tasks!

One volunteer, Christine Hall from Morpeth recently received Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s Outstanding Service Award for clocking up an incredible 807.5 volunteering hours during 2015, with 551 of those hours being accrued building the new Wildlife Discovery Centre.

Alex Lister, Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s Druridge Bay Reserves Manager said: “Without the volunteers, there wouldn’t be a building as magnificent as this one is going to be. They have all done fantastic jobs and without their long term commitment to the project, we certainly wouldn’t have got this far so quickly.”

But it’s not long now before you can experience the Wildlife Discovery Centre for yourself with the new look reserve and building due to open this autumn.

In the meantime, visit the Hauxley Nature Reserve - straw build page https://www.facebook.com/HauxleyNatureReserve on Facebook and watch the amazing time-delay video.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sue Bishop .