Some soul-searching during the pandemic catalysed my desire to turn a long-term interest for nature and wildlife into a full-time career. My first step was to undertake a wide range of conservation volunteering activities in London, including at several of Citizen Zoo’s Kingston sites, where I first met members of the team and gained personal experience of the value of urban rewilding to both nature and people.

Soon afterwards, I started a job with London’s Local Environmental Records Centre (LERC), GiGL, where I worked on the database of biological species records for the city. This role allowed me to develop a deeper understanding of London’s biodiversity and introduced me to the dedicated community of biological recorders and citizen scientists whose efforts to collect empirical data are so often vital to nature-positive decision making.

More recently, I have just returned from Central America, where I had the fantastic opportunity to undertake a three month research internship in Costa Rica’s Cordillera de Talamanca region. Nestled in the cloud-forested foothills of the country’s highest peaks, I studied neotropical bird flocks in the vicinity of a mind-bending diversity of flora and fauna including elusive jaguars, tanky Baird’s tapirs and the outlandish and magnificent resplendent quetzal.

All these prior experiences have shaped my perspective and aims as a wildlife conservationist. I believe that human welfare must be a central consideration of any serious effort to protect nature and nowhere is this more apparent than in cities, where the competition for space can be intense. I hope to use my experience and knowledge to inspire and motivate members of the public to feel connected to their local natural environments and, ultimately, be empowered to make decisions that are beneficial to both people and the planet.

In my free time I love listening to music, cooking dishes from around the world, brushing up on my (clunky) Spanish and spending time outdoors with friends and family. I have been immensely fortunate to travel a fair bit, but right now I am most excited about better understanding my own neck of the woods, particularly through the fascinating lens of rewilding. I hope to visit more rewilding projects in the UK and Europe and translate this to meaningful urban rewilding work back home.

My first week started with a corporate engagement day with the wonderful staff of Vivienne Westwood at Ealing’s Paradise Fields, the location of our exciting collaborative reintroduction project: the UK’s first fully publicly-accessible urban beaver site! I am also learning the ropes of Citizen Zoo’s broad and ambitious projects through fundraising, communications and engagement streams. It is truly inspirational to see how motivated, ambitious and dedicated my new colleagues and collaborators are in their work.

My first targets are to build up my skills across these areas to become a well-rounded Urban Rewilding Officer and to utilise my expertise in education and communication to develop community engagement and education programmes for our work. If you would like to hear more about our volunteering or education days, or have any other questions, please contact me by email here.