On a walk with forest ranger Hanne Tersmette on the Naardermeer
Last year we got to hang out with the Netherlands’ cutest forester. Hanne Tersmette is only 32 years young and is making forestry hip! She also wrote a fun book with the goal of making nature attractive again. And she succeeds very well!
Warm reception
It is still early when we report to the management office of Natuurmonumenten. It promises to be a warm day so we all walk in shorts with charming walking shoes underneath. But that doesn’t matter because we are looking forward to it! The winner of our reader action, Annemieke, is also present. Hanne is already waiting for us with a jug of coffee and a jug of tea. As we walk towards the boats, we see a whole school class already in another boat. Hanne explains that they do this more often. We ourselves have a huge boat at our disposal, what a luxury!
Our first game spotted!
Immediately as we enter the water, Hanne points out a funny little bird hanging nervously above the lake. “That’s a Common tern,” she says. We have mostly urban birds in our area, so we have immediately spotted as our first game! It’s lovely out on the water. The breeze means you don’t realize it’s warm, which makes it kind of linky. Fortunately, we all thought of sunscreen.
Nature is severe weather
Over coffee, Hanne tells us that she doesn’t actually do tours or cruises herself. The volunteers do most of that. The purpose of the boat trips is to let people enjoy the Naardermeer and of course to generate income to continue to manage and protect it. About 5 years ago Hanne started working for Natuurmonumenten. Managing nature costs a lot of money; you need people to do that, but membership numbers were dropping. By making nature more attractive you do reach people. “I fitted in there: I came from the world of advertising and already knew a thing or two about nature. I think that’s why they dared to do it with me,” Hanne says. At the time, in 2013, Hanne was Natuurmonumenten’s second communications forester. “Now every team has one,” she says. As a child, she went out with her parents, sometimes not entirely voluntarily. They especially enjoyed bird watching.
Oasis of calm in the city
The Naardermeer is located in the middle of ‘t Gooi and is truly an oasis of peace in the busy city. From the boat we regularly hear a train passing by, but after a while you don’t really hear it anymore. A lot of animals live in the area around the Naardermeer. There is a 70-strong deer population, there are foxes, many water birds and even badgers and otters have been spotted! In the early 1900s, the city of Amsterdam had plans to turn the Naardermeer into a large garbage dump. Those plans fortunately did not go through. Before then, several attempts were made to reclaim the Naardermeer. In 1629 a reclamation seemed to succeed, but to protect Amsterdam from the Spaniards, everything was flooded again. At a new attempt around 1800, the three mills, including the mill De Onrust, proved unable to provide sufficient capacity to drain the lake. A third attempt followed in 1883 with a steam pumping station, the Machine on the Meerkade. The costs proved so high, however, that the Naardermeer was preserved.
Cormorants are very entertaining
Hanne moors the boat so we can stretch our legs. There is in fact a large colony of cormorants hidden away and we go and have a look. There are so many of them! There are many young animals, which are now almost as big as the adults. You can recognize them by their brown plumage while the adults are black. Hanne explains that cormorants nest in trees but are very clumsy on branches because of their large flippers. So animals regularly fall out of trees while we are watching. They are therefore really entertaining to watch.
Forest ranger Hanne
Back in the boat, Hanne tells a little more about herself. She started in the world of advertising after her degree in Communication Science but didn’t really feel at home in it. When the vacancy at Natuurmonumenten came along, she didn’t hesitate for a moment. She was hired and five years later she is still there. In addition to wandering through nature, forest rangers also have real office days and targets. They have to take good care of plants and animals in order to maintain a certain European ecological status. If you lose a certain status, you also lose your subsidy with all its consequences. Fortunately, they have many volunteers who help the foresters maintain that status.
Sporty type
Of course we from OpstapmetLisa are curious about what Hanne does in her free time. Hanne does like a terrace every now and then, but also prefers to go into nature in her free time. Especially to exercise! Hanne loves cycling, running, mountain biking and horseback riding. You won’t easily find her in the city and online shopping is a godsend. That this job is right up her alley is a fact.
A book of her own
Early last year, Hanne’s own book came out: #Gaan! In this book she takes the reader to different nature reserves in the Netherlands. Quite a few books have already crossed the counter and it won’t be long before the second edition comes out. Hanne wrote the book outside of Natuurmonumenten, really purely because she wants people to go into nature and see how important it is to maintain nature in the Netherlands. Because of her book, Hanne has been a guest on various TV programs. For example, she has been on RTL Late Night!
Another outing
A little later we took another foray into a patch of bog moss reed bed. On it all grow plants such as reed orchids, marsh fescue and the carnivorous plant sundew. All rarities, but very common in low moorland areas like the Naardermeer. We are on peat soil so we are lucky it has been so dry the last few days. Otherwise we would probably have sunk to our knees! For city girls like us that would have been quite a challenge…. A while later, we were safely delivered back to shore. We, and winner Annemieke, really had a super fun morning. Thank you so much Hanne!
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