Cumbria Wildlife Trust’s CHARLOTTE ROWLEY reflects on a busy and successful 2014 for the conservation charity

THE happiness of children and tourism businesses increased dramatically this spring and summer as temperatures climbed and rainfall fell.

The optimism of wildlife conservationists also grew. How lovely for Cumbria Wildlife Trust’s nature reserve officers to go out and see wildlife doing so well in the early mild and sunny spring weather.

Woodland and garden birds made an early start on their broods, creating the chance to get a second round of eggs laid later in the summer. There were no serious gales which would have blown caterpillars off the leaves of trees, leaving blue tits short of food for their chicks and allowing more butterflies to take flight later in the warm summer weather.

Flowers in hedgerows bloomed for longer than usual resulting in more seeds and berries for small rodents to enjoy and in turn more mice and voles for owls to hunt.

Unfortunately one good summer is not enough to turn around the long term decline of wildlife in our county. In 2000, the Cumbria Biodiversity Action Plan – a collaboration of conservationists and scientists from across the county - recognised 21 species and 18 habitats as being at risk of being lost from Cumbria and that was only the first action plan, the second action plan never made it into print but consisted of a further 41 species and habitats. Faced with this mammoth task staff at Cumbria Wildlife Trust began to make plans to see what we could do to help species and habitats on this list.

Our top priority was a habitat called ‘lowland raised mire’, which at one time more or less surrounded Morecambe Bay. With help from our members and the Heritage Lottery Fund we were able to buy Foulshaw Moss in 1998. Finally restored to full health this year, it has taken 15 years of hard work to raise the water levels and restore the peat bog back to functioning, peat-making habitat.

It was because of this restoration work we were able to help a species at risk, the white-faced darter, which was re-introduced to Foulshaw Moss Nature Reserve in 2010 and is only one of three places you can see this dragonfly in England. The new nature reserve has also attracted ospreys, thanks to its location close to good fishing areas, and for the first time three chicks were raised and fledged at the nature reserve. In October we were thrilled to win the North West’s Green Hero Award for Combating Climate Change, thanks to the active sequestration of carbon dioxide by the now restored bog, calculated to be around 103 tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum.

Other species and habitats at risk that we have been trying to help are juniper trees and hay meadows. Juniper is declining across the UK, with 31 per cent lost from survey sites since 1970, when we re-surveyed 250 juniper sites in Cumbria we found that 58 per cent of them were in decline. By the end of March this year we had planted 6,400 junipers at eight different sites and created management plans to give them the best start. Hay meadows are in a similar state of decline with 97 per cent of flower-rich hay meadows have been lost between the 1930s and the mid 1980s. We have been working with Cumbria’s farmers and small holders to enhance, restore and manage flower rich hay meadows in the area, using traditional practices to increase plant diversity.

Our 43 nature reserves are brilliant places for wildlife and for people to get out and enjoy it, but in recent years wildlife conservationists have been looking beyond these tight boundaries. We realised for nature to really have a chance against climate and land management changes we need to start thinking big. We now have landscape-scale projects in the pipeline that aim to work with other landowners to help increase wildlife and to help it to adapt and move around.

The Morecambe Bay Local Nature Partnership is a great example of this. It is a group of like-minded organisations that are working together to deliver a 50-year vision that will see the restoration, promotion and enhancement of the network of nature conservation sites surrounding the whole of Morecambe Bay. The key habitats there are coastal and floodplain wetlands, species-rich grasslands and native woodlands, which have at-risk plants such as Teesdale violet, autumn lady’s tresses and spiked speedwell plus butterflies and moths, in particular high brown fritillary, pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies and the belted beauty moth.

As with so many good causes the last few years have been hard for us with cuts being made to government agencies Natural England and Environment Agency who alongside charities like us have championed nature. We now need to shout about the economic benefits of nature for Cumbria and the importance of wildlife to the wellbeing of people and I am sure our many members who enjoy our guided walks and volunteers who help us on nature reserves will testify to that.