It is easy to get mired in a sense of hopelessness about the biodiversity crisis, but amid the doom and gloom, there are more than a few reasons to remain upbeat. For one thing, research this year underlined that conservation action works.
Thanks to the efforts of dedicated organisations, scientists, engaged private-sector partners and thousands of committed local people, there is an abundance of biodiversity success stories springing up in the UK. While beavers and eagles may hog the headlines, there is so much more out there, from striking butterflies to diminutive plants, reimagined rivers to revived mountain slopes.
Conservation is a complex business, but new methods are emerging to preserve, improve and generate new habitat and, in many cases, attract back or reintroduce species not seen for decades. After a nudge, ecosystems are often doing much of the heavy work themselves. Inspiring examples can be the root of a wholesale fightback. It’s time to fight inertia and look towards a brighter future for UK biodiversity, with a selection of site visits worth putting on your calendar for the coming year.
Mo’ better blues
The plight of Britain’s butterflies is never far from the news, but downward arrows and the furrowed brows of lepidopterists are not the whole story. Dramatic comebacks of rare species, including the purple emperor (Apatura iris) and Duke of Burgundy (Hamearis lucina), are a notable counter to the pessimistic narrative.
The most successful of all is almost certainly the large blue (Phengaris arion), declared extinct in 1979. A meticulous programme of reintroduction since the early 90s means its range now covers swaths of south-west England. Underpinning it all was understanding its highly specialised lifecycle. As well as feeding on wild thyme, the large blue depends on one heat-loving ant, Myrmica sabuleti, to take its pupae into its nest. Getting food plants appearing at the right time close to the right ant colonies requires special attention – something that the likes of David Simcox of the Royal Entomological Society has been doing for decades.
Starting on the Polden Hills in Somerset, more than 40 sites have been restored to large blue-suitable habitat. Its range expansion has also been assisted by evolution: in the early years after reintroduction, a new type arose that would fly longer distances to find suitable spots.
One of the standout large blue residences is Daneway Banks in the Cotswolds – a success story rooted in a chance meeting of Simcox and his colleague Jeremy Thomas with a farmer in a nearby pub. They volunteered to graze rare-breed sheep on the site, maintaining the perfect vegetation for the species to thrive.
“As soon as we got the site grazed right, it absolutely took off,” says Simcox. “In the good years we’re talking about 150,000 eggs laid. It’s now big enough to be a donor site for colonising new areas.” As for where those new areas might be, Simcox is “sworn to secrecy”. Watch this space.
Where to see it: Daneway Banks, near Sapperton, Gloucestershire. Visitor information via Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust.
Stripping the willow
Woodlands are pivotal to ecosystems and at high altitude, where they are home to many specialist species, their decline can be more keenly felt. As a result of overgrazing, several of Scotland’s native mountain trees were pushed to the fringes, and none more so than its arctic-alpine willows. By the early 1990s, these trees were nearly extinct, covering an area about the size of a tennis court, hanging on to steep cliff edges.
How their prospects have changed. Joined-up efforts from conservationists and landowners over 30 years have sparked a stirring comeback. Nearly 400,000 willows have been planted across the country, using locally sourced seeds and cuttings, and thousands of hectares managed to ensure they thrive. This has practical benefits, as strengthening the tree line can help prevent flooding at lower elevations, avalanches and rockfalls. It also provides essential habitat.
Willows at high elevations support diverse communities of birds, mammals and insects. In Scotland, 20 rare sawfly species depend on them, while continued restoration efforts will probably come to the aid of the ring ouzel (Turdus torquatus), a conservation red-listed bird, and the elusive highland nymph moth (Callisto coffeella).
“Everything grows quite slowly at high altitude, so you do have to have a longer-term perspective and some patience, but I find that really exciting,” says Sarah Watts, who has tracked the progress in restoring willow scrub.
Both willow and birch have bounced back to great effect in the Ben Lawers range, which excludes grazing animals with fences, but fences have their own challenges, says Watts. The next step for other projects is to sustainably manage free-moving large mammals alongside a continued tree revival, and the early signs are promising.
Where to see it: Ben Lawers national nature reserve, near Killin, Perthshire. Visitor information via National Trust Scotland.
The orchid squad
There are few greater compliments to a species recovery effort than an official downgrading of the seriousness of the threat to that species. That’s exactly what a conservation charity is proposing for an orchid found in two areas on opposite sides of the UK.
Unlike many other orchids, the fen orchid (Liparis loeselii) is no attention-seeker. It is small and subtle, characteristics that have not favoured its success in the face of human transformation of the landscape. Nor has it been easy to find on huge sites where surrounding vegetation tends to grow feet tall. All that adds up to it having been classified as endangered ever since the UK’s conservation red list was first drawn up.
Now, that trend looks set to halt. On the Norfolk Broads, land management changes reversing decades of habitat deterioration, as well as the reintroduction of expert-cultivated plants to newly suitable sites, have seen numbers leap from the hundreds to the high tens of thousands. This has required “reading everything that’s ever been written” about the plant’s habitat preferences, says Tim Pankhurst from Plantlife.
With improving prospects for the orchid also on the sand dunes of south Wales, Plantlife is now backing its downgrading to “near threatened” – although should that happen, it doesn’t mean protection efforts end. Landowners are committing to the effective management that has pulled the species away from the precipice and boosted broader biodiversity.
“We’ve lost a lot of species, like breeding snipe and redshank at inland fens,” says Pankhurst. “People want them back, and one of the ways to do that is to actually have more fen suitable for fen orchids, so it does stand as a flagship species for a whole raft of things.”
Where to see it: Upton Fen, about 12 miles east of Norwich, Norfolk. Visitor information via Norfolk Wildlife Trust.
Soil solutions
Landscape transformations often start with soil, and Richard Scott, director of the National Wildflower Centre, has been deep in the stuff for most of his professional career. He has helped build soils at the heart of northern cities and stripped degraded topsoil to bring colourful flower displays to wasteland. But to take people-centred land regeneration to bigger patches, he has been a major proponent of a starker intervention: soil inversion, where poor soils are buried and healthy soils brought to the surface using deep ploughing; an approach, Scott says, that is not just good for native wildflowers but also for trees.
While there are standout sites highlighting soil inversion’s impact, such as Prees Heath Common in Shropshire and Forest of Flowers, Yorkshire’s top site for butterfly records, part of the philosophy behind the work is that transformed patches can seamlessly become part of the landscape and local community. This means that many locations where soils have been “flipped” are not marked with special signs. One spot in Lunt, just four miles from Liverpool docks, has had visits from corncrakes and short-eared owls.
While rewilding is often associated with hands-off approaches relying on grazing animals, this is not often feasible where Scott and other enthusiasts do their work. “The truth is, for real biodiversity, you can get there different ways, and with different forms of stress and disturbance,” says Scott. “Soil inversion is a bit of a parable in that way. I know it seems radical but, in some ways, it goes back to the more cultural connection we had with the landscape.”
Where to see it: Prees Heath Common, between Prees and Whitchurch, Shropshire. Visitor information via Butterfly Conservation.
The zero effect
To truly allow nature to take its course, you must sometimes help it start from scratch. This is the approach taken at Porlock Vale, west Somerset. Rather than follow the traditional route of restoring sections of river as they are, the National Trust took the River Aller back to “stage zero” – as it was before human intervention – by filling in part of the main channel and letting the water move naturally. It’s part of a change of mindset from seeing rivers as pipes to more like sponges, says project manager Ben Eardley, and it brings dramatic effects.
“We reconnected the flood plain late last summer, and then through into this year, the numbers of insects on site were audible and visual, they were there in clouds,” he says. “Then, you could see huge numbers of swallows, swifts and house martins, and obvious increases in the number of raptors on the site: kestrels, peregrines, barn owls. You don’t need to be an ecologist or a scientist to be able to discern that it’s evidently a very different site.”
Visitors from as far afield as Japan have been clamouring to see the work, and not just conservationists. “People often think in terms of agriculture or conservation, but it doesn’t have to be as binary as that,” says Eardley. “You can graze these restored areas; you just need to think about it and do it in maybe a slightly different way than before.”
Getting the project off the ground was far from plain sailing, but the process has served as a test for the kind of bold approaches required if the UK is to meet its biodiversity commitments, while mitigating extreme weather events. Out with prescriptive solutions to biodiversity, in with what Eardley describes as “dynamic complexity”? The revolution may be in motion.
Where to see it: Porlock Vale, Exmoor national park. Visitor information can be found via Porlock.co.uk or National Trust.
