Hello everyone!
My name is Alex and currently I am living in Beijing, where I am working as an English language teacher to young children. I started this position in September 2019 and was teaching in a classroom but since the Covid19 outbreak I have transitioned to conducting classes online. This role was not something I would have considered normally but I was interested in challenging myself with something new to gain more skills and also combine it with my love of traveling.
I have completed a BSc in conservation biology and a MSc in conservation policy at the university of Exeter. I enjoyed both of these degrees immensely and they cemented my desire to start a professional career in conservation.
Since completing these I have continued to volunteer in conservation while still searching for a paying role. One of my most memorable roles was an 11 week internship at the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota where I spent my time conducting guided tours, live informational broadcasts online as well as caring for the four black bears at the center.
I also currently co-run the volunteer led project Gloucestershire toads on roads which was created as a way to help toads during their spring breeding migration. The project allows toad patrollers to connect with others in order to have as many toad crossings covered by volunteers as possible for the most amount of time. We also maintain a record of known toad crossings in Gloucestershire and collect the data from our patrollers at the end of a season. In this role I manage a public outreach Facebook account, the projects email account, and have created press releases for print and local radio. I have conducted public presentations and training sessions for volunteers and the project has almost 150 people signed up and in 2019 we reached the highest number of toads saved with a record 7175 toads collected from Gloucestershire's roads.
A little extra fact about myself is that, as well as being a skilled horse rider, I have worked and trained with heavy horses and I trained my own horse, Fergus, to operate the cider mill at the Gloucestershire folk museum, this is something that only a handful of horses still do in the country.
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Hi Alex, thank you for introducing yourself to the WildHub community & welcome! Amazing to read about the achievements of the Gloucestershire toads project and I hope your work Beijing is going well. You may be interested in a new WildHub activity that we are launching next week, as part of our online festival. It's called WildHub Fika. Read more about it here: https://wildhub.community/users/335755-thirza-loffeld/videos/event-wildhub-fika-launch-on-june-18th-get-to-know-your-community
Hope to see you sometime at the festival!