PART of my job as a ranger with Wyre Forest District Council is to share my knowledge, experience and enthusiasm of the natural world with others.

Much of this work involves educating the district's children and even now, after 13 years, I still get a buzz when seeing a young person make that connection with some aspect of our wildlife and countryside and start to become enthralled.

The Ranger Service delivers its educational programme through a variety of mediums.

During the school holidays there are many events held on all the district's nature reserves for families, and there are clubs for children, who frequently explore wild places on day trips.

Throughout the rest of the year a variety of activities are organised through schools, and there is the weekend club known as the Young Rangers.

As well as helping to spread the message about the value and importance of our district's wildlife to these young people, the educational programme also helps the rangers build relationships with the youngsters and reduces the amount of damage and vandalism on the reserves.

One your person's scheme which has been a particular success in this field is the Far Out club for 14-17 year-olds. This club engages with young people and allows them to decide on and prepare interesting activities, which they carry out through grant funding from Wyre Forest Community Housing.

To date these young people have created an adder habitat in Wyre Forest, a dragonfly pool in Feckenham and a butterfly glade in Monkswood.

At Easter they worked on and prepared an educational survival day activity which they are going to deliver to a group of younger children from the Birchen Coppice area.

When I started this club up I had no real idea of the sorts of activities these young people would want to get into, and it has been one of the biggest surprises of my career, to see how much the club has developed. I would never have guessed just how selfless these youths would be and how much effort they would put into project that will have some real lasting wildlife value.

It is through projects like this that I am starting to see a glimmer of light, that our youth may not all be as bad as we sometimes believe them to be.