Conservation Volunteers Australia

I have found my new ideal form of volunteering. Hang out in nature and play with fun tools. Sounds great, yes?

The past three days, I've volunteered 7 hours each day with Conservation Volunteers Australia (CVA). Our day starts at 8:20 AM (which means mine starts at 7:05 so I can grab breakfast and my packed lunch and still catch the 7:39 tram) at the CVA office in North Melbourne. When I first contacted them about volunteering, I thought it would be shorter days and I'd have to get to the site myself. Instead, they drive us out there in troopies (Aussie for 4WD and other vans - always Toyota, always white) and we spend the whole day volunteering before returning around 3 or 4. Lots of hours and easy transport both make me happy.

So what do I do with CVA? Lots of stuff.

On Thursday, we headed out to Point Cook Coastal Park, 'we' being our leader, a late 20-something woman named Erin, and 5 gentlemen probably in their 60s. In the morning, we cut down boxthorn, a weed which is prevalent in the area. As the name suggests, it is indeed quite thorny. I worked with Erin (and at times our leader Matt) to tackle the boxthorn. We would wander along through the coastal field identifying the boxthorn, cutting it down with clippers and, when necessary, hand saws, and applying poison to the cut stumps so it didn't grow back. I don't generally associate conservation with poisoning plants, but it makes a lot of sense when I stopped to think about it.

At lunchtime, we drove to some picnic tables elsewhere in the park. During our lunch break, we saw about 50 black cockatoos gathered in the trees. There were perhaps 30 in one tree then most made a mass exodus to another tree further off and suddenly there were 20 more over there. It was very cool. Apparently black cockatoos are fairly rare, so it's quite a treat to get to see them at all. After lunch, we drove down to the beach and split into two groups of four to wander in opposite directions picking up trash along the coast. High tide limited the actual beach to under 10 feet in many places, often mostly covered by seaweed, but we still found lots of 'rubbish' (Aussie for trash, for those of you requiring a translation) including a dive belt with weights on it and a deflated inner tube. As we walked, we had beautiful views across the bay to Melbourne's CBD. Also very cool.

On Friday, we (now two Korean girls, another older gentleman (again around 60) named Lance, a woman named Suzanne, myself, and our leader Deb) headed out to Yarra Bend Park, one of the closest sites as it's just 4 kilometres outside the CBD. (It still took close to 30 minutes to get to it.) Our work site this time was on a hill directly overlooking the river. It being a rather steep drop-off, the river was probably about 10 feet away horizontally, 20 vertically. Our task for the day was to remove fencing that separated a narrow path from said drop-off. The ultimate goal is that another CVA group will come in and fix up the path, put up new fencing (this was quite old and often mashed up wire mesh), and mark the path with clear new signs to keep bikers off. Currently, bikers come in and create ruts (which lead to path widening as people avoid said ruts) and risk hurting themselves and others on the narrow, winding path. The goal is to have them not do that anymore. Anyway, much of our day was spent sitting on this quiet path overlooking a calm stretch of muddy brown Yarra River as we clipped through mesh wiring then rolled segments of the wiring for disposal by Parks Victoria. I mostly worked with Suzanne; it was lots of fun.

The cool animal siting of the day actually came before we headed to the site, when we stopped at a viewing platform on the way. Deb pointed out trees just across the river from the platform which were each filled with HUNDREDS of sleeping flying foxes. Again, very cool.

In the afternoon, once we had finished our work for the day, Deb took us to another site she had done work on before - a wetlands site on the way back to the city. We walked down to the wetlands and by another section of the Yarra and Deb pointed out some plants of interest and such. We also got to see where the old town swimming pool had been for the suburb which is home to the wetlands, basically a roped-off section of the river with cement bleachers and a diving board stand still extant. Deb in particular but also CVA leaders in general are very into appreciating the nature around you as you work. They remind us to work slowly and safely and take time to look up and look around you. I like that about them.

On Saturday (that being today), I headed to the Island overlooking Werribee Gorge with 9 others. The Island, about 45 minutes outside the CBD, is not a literal island but is bordered on one side by the river that runs through Werribee Gorge and on the other by a creek that sometimes flows. It's mostly a big hilly area near a forest with views of the city in the far-off distance. Since it was a weekend day, the group demographic shifted drastically from 60-year-old men to 20-something women, usually a few years out of college. Of the 10 of us, our group leader Marcus and one guy who had come with one of the girls (who is planning to write an editorial about CVA in the Monash Journal in a few weeks, having become interested after writing a story for the paper about a group of kids planting trees at the Island with CVA) were the only males. Our task today was planting trees and protecting them with tree guards (essentially white posterboard rectangular boxes with no top or bottom held in the ground by two wooden bamboo-like sticks). We planted in pairs; I worked with Jacinta, who was very nice - she had studied at Melbourne Uni and gone abroad to UNC, so we got to swap exchange experiences. Our planting work was done on a fairly steep slope (perhaps 35 to 40 degree incline), which we reached by climbing down a very steep slope (maybe 70 degrees). This was all well and good until my overly persistent (now in week 6) bronchitis tried to steal all my oxygen on the climb back up the hill. It took a very laborious and uncomfortable 10 or 15 minutes, which made me quite unhappy.

What did make me happy was planting trees. Amongst the 10 of us, we planted and guarded 10 rows of baby trees - 440 trees total - in the course of the day. Though some won't survive, most of these will grow into tall, strong trees and shrubs someday. Right now, they're between 2 and 8 inches tall for the most part. I'm still not able to identify each little tree-let, but I know that we planted eucalypts and multiple types of wattle, along with a peppermint plant and two others.

Though we spent a bit of time making tree guards before we started and after lunch, most of our time was spent sitting on this hill overlooking beautiful pastures (with 7 or 8 cows in the afternoon) and looking across at a green forest. Sometimes it rained, generally it was windy and cold, always it was stunningly nature-y and gorgeous. Today's animal siting, however, was not the cows. Once in the morning after we returned to the top of the hill before lunch (when we had a moment to look out over and across the gorge around the corner from our site) and twice while driving, I got to see kangaroos in the wild! Pretty cool. They were eastern gray kangaroos and I can attest to their phenomenal ability to freeze statue-still when they sense danger (like nearby troopie noise). The first time I saw 5, the second 6, and the third probably 10 all together on the hillside. I got to see both hopping and motionless kangaroos all hanging out on grassy hills around the Island. This made me happy.

As you have hopefully established, CVA is a good fit for me. I get to sit around in nature for hours on end giving little tree-lets life or playing with fun tools and there are always amazing animals to be seen and spectacular views. Lots of fun.