Oh my old man's a dustman,
He wears a dustman's hat,
He wears cor-blimey trousers
And he lives in a council flat.
He looks a proper nana
In his great big hobnail boots:
He's got such a job to pull them up
That he calls them daisy roots.


Heh heh... let all the non-Brits wallow in confusion for a while. <img src="images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Sorry Mate, but, a certain mob of Orangemen called THE IRISH ROVERS put that to music with a full explanation years ago.

Dale,
my father is into argriculture - reason for saying but it is v true though.
Where do you teach?

Reinhardt

In Northeast Arkansas, just in the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta, but I live in the beginning of the Ozark mountain foothills.

Stargazer,
Could you tell me where I can find more information about the following :

Forest Service (US)
National Park Service (US)
Coast Guard (US and Canada)
Los Angeles Fire Department’s Urban SAR.

Thanks in advance,
Reinhardt

The Canadian Coast Guard
( http://www.ccg-gcc.gc.ca/main_e.htm )
is run by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans
( http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/home-accueil_e.htm ),
and is not a branch of the military, unlike the USCG.

Aardwolfe,
thank you for the links. It was a wealth of information once I was able to navigate my way around the site.
Do you or anyone else know where I can find info regarding the contents of the following careers?

Forest Service (US)
National Park Service (US)

Reinhardt

I can't provide you with any first-hand information but I've heard that nowadays, the US Park Service is looking less for people with outdoor experience and more for people with a police background. <img src="images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" /> Sadly, it's a sign of the times -as the National Parks get more and more crowded, the need for Law Enforcement personnel becomes greater. Some parks, especially along the Mexican border, have been all but taken over by drug runners and people smugglers. However, if you're still interested, and if you're eligible (I have absolutely no idea if you need to be a US citizen to apply for any of these organisations) a couple of years with any police force may not go amiss. (I've also read somewhere that there are an increasing number of calls where the Park Service has had to go out and rescue one of their own Rangers who's gotten lost; a side effect of hiring people without much wilderness experience. So I would guess that a stint with the Military Police, and taking a couple of courses in Wilderness Survival, Escape and Evasion, etc. might look very good on a resume. Just my uninformed thoughts - I've never really looked into any of these careers myself.

Aardwolfe,
That’s some good points you made there. I think a few survival courses on my CV wouldn’t go amiss. Paperwork for a paper world.
Ref the Law personnel need, its sounds very romantic chasing bandits through the forest but I guess the real world is different if not more boring.
In the mean time I’ve done some more research by talking to a Canadian guy (Canada is the area I would really like to work) and as far as he knew (he’s a chef) there are still people called forest rangers that basically look for after the forest and search for missing people. Is there any truth in this? That’s sounds like the perfect job description to me.
Also been planning my future a bit more: what I’d like to do after A levels is to work with a volunteer SAR team in the UK for one year to get experience before ultimately going to Canada the year after for another year.
This way I really discover what I would like to do before I set of to Uni.

Well, as far as the Law Enforcement thing goes, I only know what I've seen on a National Geographic documentary and an article I read in Backpacker magazine (April 2003) about "Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument" on the Mexican border. They get an estimated 300,000 visitors a year; of these, 3,000 are legitimate tourists, the rest are drug smugglers and illegal aliens. A Park Ranger was murdered there last year, by a Mexican drug smuggler running from the Mexican authorities. So that part's less romantic, as Buffy would say. <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I don't know about Forest Rangers - it may depend on the province, I don't think it's a federal responsibility. In Alberta, they have (or used to have) Fire Lookouts, whose job is to live in a remote cabin and report any smoke or fire that they see. This is seasonal employment, at best.

Search and Rescue is primarily handled by the military but there are a large number of volunteer SAR organisations. Far from getting paid to do it, these volunteers have to shell out large sums of their own money for the "privilege" of volunteering their time.

I suspect most of the outdoor jobs are connected with tourism - ski instructors, backcountry guides, hunting guides, climbing instructors, etc. - or with the oil industry (prospecting, inspecting pipelines, etc.)

I went to the Canadian Google (www.google.ca) typed in "Forest Rangers" (in quotation marks) and clicked "Pages from Canada". Don't know if this will work for you, but I did find this reference to Forest Rangers:

http://www.nupge.ca/news_2003/n29au03b.htm

(N.B. forest rangers battling fires in Alberta and B.C.)

It appears from reading this article that Forest Rangers are Provincial employees.

And I found this on a childrens' web site (sorry, but I take my intelligence where I find it <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> )

http://www.whatdotheydo.com/forest_r.htm

But it appears to deal with the US Forest Rangers (see the reference to Montana).

Or this reference:

http://www.utoronto.ca/env/lib_hold/db1/files/10129.htm

I'll see if I can find any further information for you. Probably a university degree in biology, oceanography, geology, or "earth sciences" (?) would be a good starting point.