Wildlife conservation in Nova Scotia, Canada
| country: | Canada |
| departures: | 2010: 14 Mar, 11 Apr, 2 May, 13 Jun, 4 Jul, 15 Aug, 26 Sep, 24 Oct, 5 Dec |
| price: | From £1195 - £1395 (14 days) excluding flights |
| vouchers: | Gift vouchers can be used with this holiday |
the amazing things you'll be doing
Working in a diversity of habitats, from forests to meadows and from wetlands to sweeping beaches, you will use various methods to monitor Nova Scotian wildlife. You'll observe the behavior of raccoons, beavers, skunks, and porcupines, and establish the locations of dens and wildlife trails. You may also use infrared video surveillance and camera traps to monitor more elusive animals such as fisher (a type of marten), coyote, or bobcat.
You'll use trapping grids to sample rodents and shrews, and count deer and snowshoe hare droppings to estimate their population densities and habitat preferences. You may also be involved with using bat detectors to count bats, sampling invertebrates, surveying seabirds, and watching for marine wildlife. In your recreational time, you can go to the waterfront town of Lunenburg and visit museums, see the famous racing schooner Bluenose, check email, and stock up on provisions.
Your team will stay in traditional South Shore accommodations, in double rooms with twin beds and shared bathrooms, a lecture room, and a large garden with a deck for relaxing in the evening. Spectacular white-sand beaches, rocky inlets, and salty lagoons pepper this coastline, including some of the few remaining breeding areas for the endangered piping plover. Nutritious meals will be provided, sometimes featuring local specialties.
You'll use trapping grids to sample rodents and shrews, and count deer and snowshoe hare droppings to estimate their population densities and habitat preferences. You may also be involved with using bat detectors to count bats, sampling invertebrates, surveying seabirds, and watching for marine wildlife. In your recreational time, you can go to the waterfront town of Lunenburg and visit museums, see the famous racing schooner Bluenose, check email, and stock up on provisions.
Your team will stay in traditional South Shore accommodations, in double rooms with twin beds and shared bathrooms, a lecture room, and a large garden with a deck for relaxing in the evening. Spectacular white-sand beaches, rocky inlets, and salty lagoons pepper this coastline, including some of the few remaining breeding areas for the endangered piping plover. Nutritious meals will be provided, sometimes featuring local specialties.
a day in a life of a volunteer
Daily schedules vary but on most days the team will check small mammal traps, weather stations, camera traps, etc in the morning and will conduct species surveys, dropping surveys, transects, and practical conservation work (e.g. building bat boxes, hides, etc.) in the afternoon. The evening meal will be followed by animal observations (e.g. porcupines, beavers, skunks) and bat surveys or by trips to the pub and the beach as well as interim data analyses. volunteer travel - what's it all about?
Are you looking for an adventurous trip with a purpose, or on a gap year or career break? If you want to make a difference in some of the world’s most important conservation areas - and in community projects - then volunteer trips are for you! Volunteers tend to have a sense of adventure, and come from a range of different backgrounds and from all over the world. Edward Abbey said 'sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul'.
how this holiday makes a difference
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This project is collecting data on the impacts of climate change. Evidence of changes linked to global warming is building on science’s growing knowledge of species and ecosystem responses to biospheric pressures.
Research staff are members of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology (Wildlife Conservation Research Unit) and they work with a wealth of other experts from around the world to share knowledge, collaborate on findings and synthesize ideas, giving added value to everyone’s work. In Nova Scotia, they are members of the Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute and work to apply practical solutions to the problems wildlife faces locally and regionally. Project data is supplied to Environment Canada’s Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network with a view to developing mammal Environment Management Plans. Results are also made accessible to the public. There is an environmental policy for this expedition and sustainable practices are implemented wherever possible. These include addressing issues of resources, waste, water, energy, biodiversity, together with adhering to ‘leave no trace’ principles. We are a not-for-profit international environmental organisation committed to conserving the diversity of life on earth and the world’s natural resources in order to meet the needs of current and future generations. On any one of our many projects around the world you are certainly not a tourist. You will be working as a field assistant helping world renowned scientists on real environmental projects, and learning about conservation issues. We give people the knowledge and the motivation to do something positive towards helping the environment, regardless of experience and background. The data that you will help to collect will be used to inform conservation decision makers around the world. Since 1971 our research has led to: We are aware that many people travel to their project by air and recognise the impact of this on the environment. In an effort to minimise this, we have teamed up with an organisation that offsets emissions from your flights by funding renewable energy, energy efficient and forest restoration projects around the world. As an environmental organisation we recognise that our day-to-day operations have an impact on the local, regional and global environment. We have an environmental policy which outlines our commitment to continuous improvements in our environmental performance. We have developed an Environmental Management System based on the guidelines and standards set out in ISO14001 and the Global Reporting Initiative, in order to measure our performance against agreed targets to deliver our environmental policy. These include: paper usage, recycling, responsible travel, carbon offsetting, green energy providers and many more environmental and social principles that form a continuous thread throughout our whole operations. Main image courtesy of Christina Buesching |
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