As a learning officer for a wildlife charity, I come into contact with hundreds of young people who are fascinated by wildlife and desperate to help take care of our precious natural world.

Many of them are looking for ways to get involved in conservation but are too young to get work experience or legally volunteer (which we offer to ages 18 and up).

Sadly it has also become clear to me that, for children and teenagers today, the challenges facing the natural world can seem increasingly overwhelming.

At a recent ‘Working in Wildlife Conservation’ workshop for 15-17-year-olds at our Sutton Courtenay Environmental Education Centre, teenagers talked to us about the constant negative news in the media and the very few positive stories about the environment.

The rise in ‘eco-anxiety’ is all too real.

At BBOWT’s ranger clubs, we offer young people aged eight to 17 opportunities to not only learn reliable, useful facts about nature and climate, but also meet others with similar and interests and have grown-up conversations.

But perhaps most valuable of all, our rangers clubs give young people the chance to try practical conservation work that can make a real difference for local wildlife.

Our rangers learn how to use professional tools; they learn bush craft skills like how to light a fire (even in the rain!); they have helped us to create wildlife gardens, and they learn real conservation skills like how to identify animals, plants and fungi, just like our ecologists do.

We host our rangers clubs at five sites across our area, each of which offers its own unique habitat, opportunities and experiences.

At Sutton Courtenay near Didcot we have a network of ponds that host a population of protected great crested newts that we often see swimming. College Lake near Aylesbury is a huge nature reserve that we have carved out of a former quarry and has an amazing population of native and visiting water birds unlike anywhere else. Our Windsor Great Park sessions are hosted at an environmental centre in the woods in the grounds of the Royal estate, while our Woolley Firs education centre near Maidenhead boasts a huge patchwork of woodlands, meadows and ponds with a vast array of birds, mammals, insects and amphibians. Our Nature Discovery Centre near Newbury has an enormous wildlife lake but is also nextdoor to our famous Thatcham Reedbeds nature reserve.

We host our two-hour rangers club one Saturday a month at each of these amazing sites, and rangers who come back each month get to know the wildlife that lives there, get to see how these reserves change with the seasons – and contribute in small ways to how the habitats are managed.

This practical conservation work is always especially popular.

Understanding why conservation work is carried out then completing a task using a professional tools gives a huge sense of achievement: our rangers really get to see how conservation can achieve positive outcomes for wildlife and people, and even learn how they could take action in their own neighbourhoods, at home or at school.

Add to that the opportunity to be out on the nature reserve, away from other pressures, and it’s a winner!

Plus there is always time during the sessions to chat about their interests over a cup of hot chocolate.

Some of these young people may be our future volunteers, reserves officers, ecologists, fundraisers and advocates for the environment, and our upper age limit of 17 ensures that, for the oldest rangers who want to keep learning and training, we provide a stepping stone straight into volunteering and traineeships.

We believe that it is vital, as we lecture the next generation about the nature and climate crisis, that we also start to give them the knowledge, skills and tools that they need to start helping fix these problems today.

If you know a young person who would like to join us, find the next session near you at bbowt.org.uk/events