The Mountain Ambassador Programme: connecting families with nature

There was an opportunity to have a presence there of someone who could just help interpret the landscape a little bit and enrich the visitor experience. So each mountain ambassador brings something different to the roles. We all have other roles within the council.

My primary role within the council is in child education and nature connection. So what I bring to the Mountain Ambassador role is very child-focused, and very play-focused, and very child-led nature engagement. Other mountain ambassadors might bring their experience with track work, or with visitor safety. Together, we've created this program that allows visitors to come up and speak with us, and we help guide them in their own experience of the mountain.

We have a huge number of different activities that have been built up over many years. They're all very interactive, and one of my favourites that we do is Waterbug Wonderland - which is where we bring kids and their families into the waterways of the mountain and we do go through a waterbug assessment.

We get into the water with nets and scoop up the bugs, and have a taxonomic identification flowchart. We use that information to record the health of that point in the waterway. The joy and the curiosity that you see not only with the kids, but often with their parents - you just can't get them away from the microscopes and the float art. 

We also do guided fungi walks, we do platypus walks, we do lots of arts and crafts. There's one where we go and we make little sculptures out of clay - you choose your favorite native animal, and you make a little clay sculpture, and then we go and release them into the wild and create little communities of creatures and scavenger hunts.   

There's so many different things that we can do to bring kids into nature.