Nature reserve

And you've started the Osprey, what do you call it? The Osprey Leadership Foundation.

And that's what, through the Osprey Leadership Foundation, in many ways my inspiration for setting that up was my early experiences at Rutland Water, when I had people like Roy as mentors and Tim Appleton who set up the nature reserve at Rutland Water, who are conservationists with a very forward-thinking, proactive outlook.

They want to try things, they're not scared of things going wrong.

They're doers.

It was the long-term impacts of DDT that had really caused populations to crash.

But the translocation of young had started to enable the population to recover in areas where it had been lost.

But it hadn't been tried anywhere in Europe, so it was really pioneering, it was groundbreaking, but Tim and Roy went for it, they got permission, and over the course of six years, 64 young ospreys were brought down, collected under licence by Roy in Scotland, and then released on the Nature Reserve.

What date are we talking about? So

His name is Daniel Ross, and he is the creator of the Ranger Roger series.

Inspired by real-life excursions with his sons and his love of Australia's wildlife, Daniel takes young readers into the fictional Thin Gummy Jig Nature Reserve, where adventure comes with lessons about courage, kindness, responsibility, and protecting the natural world.

We're delighted to have this very talented author join us here today, and we ask viewers like you to support authors like him by subscribing to our channel and by purchasing his amazing book.

The links are below this interview.

Wonderful.

Wonderful.

And of course, wonderful in your book as well is the setting, the Thin Gummy Jig Nature Reserve.

Tell us about that reserve you created.

It's absolutely stunning.

So that is all like National Trust, like Studland and our Nature Reserve and things like that.

Yeah, I spent a day in there yesterday.

This is really beautiful.

Volunteers are active in habitat restoration, education, seed processing, transcription, gardening, photography, and other disciplines.

Their stories look different, but they're built on the same bedrock, showing up again and again for the forest preserves and each other.

Let's meet some of them.

I'm Brett Peto.

This is Words of the Woods,

coming to you

from the Lake County Forest Preserves in Libertyville, Illinois.

Today, we're celebrating the time and talent volunteers contribute to the Forest Preserve's mission.

You're more than welcome to come out at lunchtime and check it out.

I mean, it's so easy to come out and park at the Nature Reserve parking lot out by the playground and walk in the trail.

Because the headquarters or the base camp is what Lisa likes to call it, is... is right at the end of that trail where all the trails meet there.

And so you can't miss it.

If the prey density is low, they can even range a thousand square kilometer.

Now, what is interesting is if you take all the protected areas, the National Park and Nature Reserves of Central Asia or Central and South Asia, less than 10% of those parks are big enough to have a healthy population of snow leopards.

I use the word elusive like 500 times in this hour, and that implies that human-snow leopard interaction is exceedingly rare.

But that's not necessarily true in your observation.

There's a sign, for example...

in Hernando County here in Florida at the Weeki Wachee Preserve that says, Nature Preserve, no swimming.

But a group, including a child, didn't heed that sign and they went swimming.

And so when a young child was attacked by a nine to 12 foot alligator, he survived amazingly.