Wayfinders was a series of 3 “field skills” weekends that Youngwilders’ organised at Maple Farm over Spring and Summer this year. Each one had distinct focuses, with legends in the game in each topic area coming down to teach the fine attendees. May was grassland and birds, June was invertebrates and July was woodland, bats and reptiles. Huge thank you to our instructors, Jack Narbed, Meg Cookson, Daniel Banks, Sophia Reinisch, Dee Sharma, Francis Kelly, Colin Hart, Lily Walwyn, Conor McNeil and Joseph Bristow. All of you nailed it.

Youngwilders launched ‘Wayfinders’, to help young people to improve their career skill set, or just learn nature skills for the sheer joy of it.

During the first weekend we explored the soil beneath our feet, various habitat survey methods, delved into habitat management for wildlife, conducted bird survey transects and built nightingale poles and owl boxes. No prior experience was required or expected! The agenda was packed with learning opportunities, and a similar pattern was used for the second and third workshops.

To those who haven’t been, Maple Farm is an incredibly beautiful site that Youngwilders have been working to rewild for the last 2 and a half years. There are few better places to be when the Sun is shining, especially at our brand spanking new outdoor classroom on site!

Some personal highlights include the ringing of the nightingale on Wayfinders 1, and discovering that the number of Maple Farm breeding pairs in the last three years has risen from 1 to 5 (!!). On Wayfinders 2, Sophia’s insect ID’ing sessions, revealing to the team that your instincts on what kind of insect is what can be very wrong! And less educationally, at Wayfinders 3, the attendees all sitting around the campfire talking about what they’ve loved about the Wayfinders series and how much they appreciate the other attendees and organisers, it was turbo wholesome and a real career highlight for the Youngwilders team.

Three other points of order that would leave this blog incomplete if we weren’t to address them: (1). Meg Cookson, Youngwilders’ Lead Ecologist and the primary organiser of the Wayfinders series, is a goddess on Earth. She took something from an idea to one of our largest successes, all while working part-time. Not too shabby if you ask me (2). A lot of the feedback focused on the mental health benefits of coming to the Wayfinders weekend, this is not something we set out to do specifically, but was a joy to read and is a side to our work we hope to maintain and develop in the years to come. (3) From the Youngwilders team perspective, the whole Wayfinders process was unprecedentedly rewarding. Using the classroom we’ve built, surveying the land we’ve been stewarding back to health, working with and hosting parts of our network we’ve been building in the past few years. It felt like a lot of different strands of our work had coalesced into something beautiful, something which is exactly the kind of thing we want to be doing.