Saving Ratty
How Highways England is helping voles
“You see the transformer, the little green box,” says Pat Howard, pointing about 20m away. “Just to the left of that is where the little ringed plovers nested. It wasn’t this overgrown then, it was quite bare, so it was the sort of habitat they like.”
We’re standing just outside a set of fancy but temporary cabins that act as the operations centre for what is currently the UK’s biggest road project – the Highways Agency’s £1.5bn upgrade of 34km of the A14 from Cambridge to Huntingdon. The patch Pat’s indicating has been partially colonised by bristly oxtongue, some of it now going to seed, but otherwise there’s just cars and gravel here, with the constant drone of heavy traffic in the background and dust in the back of your throat.
When he first spotted the tiny waders – a species usually attracted to artificial locations such as gravel pits – Pat put some plastic green fencing around them, but it wasn’t enough. “They were still flighty and nervous, and we were disturbing them,” he recalls, “so we actually took half the car park out of operation.”
In fact, after he installed some CCTV to keep an eye on the little ringed plovers and beam images of them back inside the centre, workers became surprisingly protective of them. “I keep getting questions, even now,” says Pat. “‘Where’s the chick gone?’ they ask. ‘Well, the chick’s half way back to Africa,’ I tell them.”
HOWARD'S WAY
Pat Howard is the lead ecologist for the A14 upgrade, and protecting a pair of waders that have randomly invaded the main car park is not a critical part of his job description. Instead, he’s been charged with ha far more strategic role, ensuring that whe en the project is finish hed in 2020, nature in ge eneral is a winner not a lo oser.
“We are creating 271ha of new wildlife habitat, we’re planting two trees for every one we cut down and we’re creating 13 new lakes,” says Howard. “I think the legacy from this will be positive for biodiversity.”
Three of the ponds will provide new habitat for great crested newts, and 200 bat boxes and five owl boxes have been installed, while the new road will eventually have 34 wildlife bridges going across it.
But Pat must also take account of incidental issues, such as breeding birds, and make sure workers driving trucks and operating diggers aare aware
they are legally protected. “I get called a bunny hugger and those sorts of things,” he admits, “but a lot of it in jest. I think we’ve got a good working relationship with the guys here.”
On a previous project, Pat had to put an articulated dumper truck out of action for three weeks after a pied wagtail decided to build its nest on the drive shaft under the cab. But some birds are remarkably tolerant of noise and disturbance – he’s seen skylarks raise a family within 5m of a haul route that had 35-tonne trucks lumbering up and down it.
One of the key parts of Pat’s work is to manage the design and construction of vegetated ditches for water voles – so-called ‘enhancement areas’ – new January 2018 habitats, created from nothing, to replace what has been lost and ensure that the local population is not fragmented. Four have been done so far, and others may follow if he sees a need.
Individuals in affected areas are trapped and taken to ‘water vole hotels’ for a period of time, while new ditches are dug and specially built with Rattyfriendly shelving and planted up with seed-impregnated coire matting to provide almost instant vegetation on which the water voles can feast. When the new riverbank is ready, the water voles are released.
“We know this sort of thing works,” says Julia Massey, the A14 upgrade’s water vole specialist. “When I worked for the Environment Agency we had to do some emergency work on a flood defence project, and it involved incorporating features for water voles over 600m of water course. I surveyed it every year until 2015, and they were thriving there.”
Charlie Goodhaire, a site foreman for the A14 upgrade, is largely enthusiastic about the work being done to protect wildlife. “I won’t lie, at first I thought ‘All this for water voles', and you kind of think money in your head,” he says. “But you can see how much we’re taking away from them, so you’ve got to tie it back in somehow.”
There is another side to building or upgrading roads, however. Some experts say they are bad for the environment because they don’t reduce congestion but increase the number of vehicles. According to research, this can amount to an average escalation in traffic of 20 per cent, and a consequent increase in carbon emissions.
I GET CALLED A BUNNY HUGGER AND THOSE SORTS OF THINGS, BUT A LOT OF IT IN JEST.”
But if the A14 upgrade shows that it is possible for a substantial civil engineering project to mitigate for impacts on water voles and other species, there are other examples where this is not the case. Take, for example, the long-term viability of Britain’s largest nightingale colony.
NIGHTINGALE NIRVANA
In the early 2000s, Medway Council began to eye up the former Ministry of Defence (MOD) training site of Lodge Hill, on the Hoo Peninsula north of Rochester, as a potential location for 5,000 houses, amounting to one sixth of the 29,500 new homes that Medway needs to build by 2035.
Then, in 2012, a survey revealed that Lodge Hill was home to an astonishing 85 singing male nightingales, 1.5 per cent of the entire UK population. As Adrian Thomas, a project manager for the RSPB who is leading the fight to save Lodge Hill, says: “To have a site with five is good, 15 is amazing, but 85 is unprecedented.”
The remarkable discovery prompted Natural England to designate Lodge Hill as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), but a planning application to develop the site submitted by the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (which deals with land issues for the MOD) was approved in 2014. This included proposals to provide compensation habitat for nightingales at another parcel of ministry-owned land some 20km away on the other side of the Thames Estuary.
This land, just outside Shoeburyness, is protected uunder European legislation, not beccause nightingales breed there, butt because it’s a wetland site whhere thousands of geese and waders spend the winter. The next nearest significant nightingale colony to Lodge Hill is probably at Fingringhoe Wick, another 40km further north.
“We estimate it would have taken 10–15 years to create the mature scrub with invertebrate-rich, sunny patches at Shoeburyness that nightingales require,” Thomas says. Even if that were done, there’s no evidence they would fly past their old home of Lodge Hill on their return to Britain from Africa and carry on to the shiny new habitat at Shoeburyness.
“As far as we know, Shoeburyness was a non-starter for the developers, let alone us,” adds Thomas.
The planning application for Lodge Hill was withdrawn in August 2017, but Medway Council leader Alan Jarrett is hopeful the new landowner will put one forward some time in 2018. “Quite a significant chunk of the site is not an SSSI,” he says, “and I want to see a proper balance between conservation and development needs.”
As Jarrett points out, Lodge Hill became a nightingale haven by chance – the site was used as a store for cordite explosives, and trees and scrub were planted between the bunkers to minimise possible impacts if any of it unexpectedly ignited. It’s not understood at what point this then became attractive to nightingales, but unless it’s actively managed, it will eventually lose the understorey scrub that is vital for the breeding birds.
Even if the council accepts limitations on what parts of the site can be developed, Thomas is clear that any development within the SSSI would harm the nightingales, contrary to national planning rules, while anything outside it would need to be carefully designed not to have an indirect impact on them.
Comparing the benefits of creating habitat for water voles and other species in the shadow of a major road project with the likely demise of our biggest nightingale colony in the face of a housing development is perhaps unfair. Transport links have a history of evolving into wildlife habitats, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that the same can be done with a highway.
Jarrett says his job is to make sure that the needs of the 280,000 people who live in the area are properly catered for. “Having wild places on your doorstep plays a vital role in public health,” he says. “It’s not a question of birds versus people.”
In an ideal world, that could be true, but the reality is that wildlife does often lose out to human development.
A SITE WITH 15 NIGHTINGALES IS AMAZING, 85 IS WITHOUT PRECEDENT.”