Bringing Great Bustards back from the brink

SIR – Your report (“National Trust puts habitats before houses to help save natural world”, March 19) on the conservation charity’s plans to reverse wildlife decline on its land included the heartening news that Great Bustards are “on the cusp of becoming self-sustainable in the UK”, following their reintroduction on Salisbury Plain.

Technically made extinct in Britain when the last native bird was shot in 1832, stray birds were still seen in Wiltshire as late as 1871, when a hen bird was shot at Maddington. It was stuffed and displayed in Salisbury museum – but not before the museum’s curator, Edward Stevens, had served its meat at a dinner party, pronouncing “the breast like plover, the thigh not unlike pheasant”. Peter Saunders Salisbury, Wiltshire

SIR – We hope that the National Trust’s core principle of protecting wildlife will be taken into account when it comes to the road scheme around Stonehenge.

The southern Till valley – with its rich ecology, unspoilt countryside, wet meadows and river habitats – will be destroyed if a southern A303 Winterbourne Stoke bypass (west of Stonehenge) is chosen. Carolyn MacDougall Campaign for the Preservation of the Southern Till Valley Berwick St James, Wiltshire

Not for consumption: Great Bustards in Wiltshire, where their numbers are increasing