Dorset is now the home of the UK’s first super national nature reserve
Landowners have joined forces to bring together 11 essential wildlife habitats on the Isle of Purbeck.
The bare statistics do not do justice to the enterprise as a whole – seven organisations collaborating to create a ‘super reserve’ of 3,300ha, which is home to 5,000 species of invertebrates.
This is what’s happened on the Isle of Purbeck, the peninsula shielding Poole Harbour in south Dorset. It is Britain’s most important lowland heathland site, one of the few areas in Britain where all six native reptiles can be found, and home to rare birds such as Dartford warblers and woodlarks.
Here, conservation groups such as the National Trust and RSPB, and the Government’s wildlife agency Natural England, have been working for more than 50 years to conserve what’s left of this precious habitat.
The creation of the Purbeck
Heaths National Nature Reserve, according to the RSPB’s
Dorset reserves manager
Peter Robertson, is in part a celebration of the achievements of the last half century. “The
RSPB first bought land here in 1965 – 200ha of what is now Arne,” he says. “Now it’s 900ha.”
Joining various estates together into one reserve will allow conservationists to take a more hands-off approach to managing the land. The RSPB and National Trust, for example, will take down fences between their reserves to allow livestock to wander freely – in the process, creating habitat where insects can thrive. Robertson gives the example of the rare Purbeck mason wasp, which needs tiny bare patches of sand and clay in which to breed. Until now, these were created by volunteers with spades, but – with a larger area to play with – they can now allow cattle to do the same job.
David Brown, property ecologist for the National Trust’s Purbeck Estate, says traditional conservation management tends to be highly prescriptive because they are often dealing with such small areas. Now they can take more risks. “We can let some of the semi-natural processes back into the landscape to allow it to function naturally again,” he says.
Over time, the coalition of groups also want to create a more coherent strategy for managing the annual 2.5 million tourists to Purbeck, so they get the most out of their visit to one of Britain’s most precious wildlife landscapes.
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