2021 has kicked off in a similar fashion to 2020, and with further restrictions in place, many of my colleagues are now on furlough and some aspects of my role are impossible to carry out. On the plus side, as a fairly new member of staff I couldn’t be furloughed and I am grateful to be able to carry on working during this lockdown. There have even been some opportunities to take on new tasks and responsibilities which have made January much more stimulating than anticipated.
One of the highlights of this month has been taking responsibility for Froglife’s Instagram account. This has been a great learning opportunity for me to develop my social media skills and express my creativity. It has also been a lot of fun coming up with content and researching fascinating topics to share. Responding to questions from members of the public has also been interesting and a good way to test, and improve, my amphibian, reptile and pond knowledge.
This month I have also taken on more responsibility for delivering our online wildlife gardening workshops. After watching my colleagues run several of these workshops and studying up, I tried my hand at delivering small sections of the workshops early in January. By the end of the month I was delivering entire sessions independently. Slowly building up to this was definitely useful, and I now feel very confident and enjoy doing them! It’s great to be able to take on more responsibility like this and play an active role in our public engagement activities.
As I am now working remotely full-time, there are a lot of things I haven’t been able to do this month, namely all of our in-person public engagement and habitat work. This has been a shame, but I have still been busy working from home. My personal habitat project, which is working on the RSPB Loch Lomond site, has been slow-moving due to restrictions and unfortunately I have been unable to visit the site. However, I have still been able to gain experience creating and contributing to various important documents and developing my collaboration skills with other organisations. I look forward to visiting the site and moving this project forward, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.
Some other tasks from this month have included updating and improving spreadsheets, researching funding opportunities, writing project updates and much more. My role has become quite varied this month, which is ideal as it means I have been able to get lots of new experiences and develop new skills.