Andrew Steele - volunteer wildlife monitor

[Judith Parry, volunteer photographer] 
I nominated Andrew for Volunteer of the Year because he's a very quiet man. He gets on with the job that he loves, doing his butterfly walks.  

[Andrew]  
The main role I do with my volunteering with the Woodland Trust is monitoring a lot of the butterflies and other insects on site during the peak season, which is April to October. 

[Tim Wright, woodland working group leader] 
For six months of the year, for seven years, he’s taken a specific route once a week around Heartwood Forest and he’s counted over 17,000 butterflies and he records roughly where he’s seen them on the site – twenty-nine species of butterfly! 

[Andrew] 
We’ve had like a couple of clouded yellows and we had a purple emperor last year, which was the first one; common blues and the short-eared owls that we get in the winter here. And I think it’s just getting outside and then contributing to sort of science and what’s outside in the environment.  

[Agneta Burton, Heartwood volunteer] 
All of that data goes into the national recording schemes like the butterfly conservation, and also will be Woodland Trust data available for people to look at how things are developing.  

[Judith] 
His passion for what he does, it’s incredible. His knowledge is incredible. If you go on a walk with him, as he passes that information on to you, it’s amazing. You learn so much.  

[Chloé Harmsworth, Heartwood volunteer] 
It’s funny, because he didn’t actually tell me how much he’d been doing for the Woodland Trust, so when I found out about that, I knew I had to suggest that he should be Volunteer of the Year. 

[Judith] 
For him to get some recognition for what he does, he would say that probably he doesn’t want it, but he deserves a huge thank you for what he really puts into Heartwood and to the monitoring that goes on here.  

[Tim] 
A fantastic person and a first-class ambassador if you will, in his way, for what we’re trying to do here in Heartwood.  

[Andrew] 
Yeah, I recommend volunteering for the Woodland Trust. It allows you to enjoy the countryside, meet new, different people who you’d probably never see otherwise and gets you out the house, and it’s always nice to come up here just for a nice walk, even on a cold day.  

[Tim] 
Extremely quiet person, an unsung hero in many ways.