National Trust puts habitats before houses to help save natural world

it by doing what we can on our own land. Despite the battering it’s taken over many decades, nature has an incredible ability to rejuvenate and revive if given the conditions to thrive.

“Birds such as the cuckoo, lapwing and curlew are part of the fabric of our rural heritage. But they’ve virtually disappeared from the countryside. We want to see them return to the fields, woods and meadows again, along with other wildlife which was once common and is now rare.”

Last year The Wildlife Trusts’ “State of Nature” report found that one in six of Britain’s wild species is at risk of vanishing, with intensive farming largely to blame.

Creatures added to the threatened list include the Kentish snake millipede, the mole cricket, the necklace ground beetle and the yellow pogonus, a small sand beetle found in salty marshes. Hedgehogs, natterjack toads, greater crested newts, turtle doves and nightingales are also facing alarming drops in numbers.

The Trust owns almost 250,000 hectares of land, more than 1 per cent of land in the UK, and cares for 775 miles of coast.

Around 10 per cent of land owned by the Trust has been identified as priority habitat which is threatened, and projects are already underway to help revive Britain’s wildlife on Trust land. At Malham Tarn in the Yorkshire Dales, England’s highest freshwater lake, water voles have been reintroduced to help stem their decline from 90 per cent of rivers and streams.

At Sheffield Park in East Sussex, gardeners have been restoring ancient bluebell woods, which are under threat from invasive Spanish bluebells.

Marian Spain, chief executive of conservation charity Plantlife, said: “Half of our Important Plant Areas, botanical hotspots of international importance, The National Trust wants to increase the habitat for threatened native species such as bluebells, above, the large blue butterfly, left, and water vole, right includes land belonging to the National Trust. Plantlife is already working with the Trust on how to manage their land for threatened plants such as cornfield flowers and oakwood lichens, how to create wildflower meadows, and even purchasing a flock of more than 400 sheep for the National Trust shepherd on the Great Orme.

“It is a bold commitment by one of our largest landowners and we are excited about extending the breadth and scale of our partnership.”

The new plans will include enlarging current habitats, and joining up areas to create wildlife corridors to allow animal populations to move and expand.

Many of the Trust’s 1,500 farmers are already carrying out practices which benefit wildlife, and the charity will talk to them in the coming months to learn how to introduce naturefriendly measures into all its farmland.

George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, said: “I commend the National Trust for its determination to work positively with its tenant farmers to achieve greater nature conservation objectives from its land.

“Accepting that it has much to learn from working in partnership with its tenants who are already farming to high environmental standards, the National Trust must now put in place the practical arrangements to deliver this. “Farm tenants will be heartened by the National Trust’s clearly expressed position that good environmental management in the countryside cannot be divorced from the achievement of productive and sustainable farming.” Andrea Leadsom, the Environment Secretary, said: “The National Trust has always been synonymous with our beautiful countryside, and I welcome plans to create thousands of hectares of new habitat for some of our most important species. “It is my ambition that we become the first generation to leave the natural environment in a better state than we found it, and we can only do this by working closely with farmers and landowners – growing hedgerows, restoring earth banks and creating wetlands.

“I’m really pleased nature will be prioritised across the Trust’s farmland, supporting even more of our plants and wildlife and helping deliver our target to create 200,000 hectares of priority habitat by 2020.”

Great bustards are on the cusp of becoming self sustainable in the UK for the first time in 185 years.

The world’s heaviest flying bird was hunted to extinction in Britain, with the last bustard shot in 1832.

Since 2004, the Great Bustard Group (GBG) has released hundreds of chicks on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. David Waters, from the GBG, said if it was a “reasonable year” it would be the first “new great bustard population” to be established anywhere in the world.

Over the past 13 years, a population of about 50 birds has been established using chicks from Russia and Spain.

It is hoped that by 2019 the number of “release birds” will have reached 100.