Wetlands
Teeming with insects, rich in plants and a haven for mammals, wetlands offer an unforgettable experience. They play a vital role in supporting wildlife, purifying water and capturing carbon.
Teeming with insects, rich in plants and a haven for mammals, wetlands offer an unforgettable experience. They play a vital role in supporting wildlife, purifying water and capturing carbon.
The eider is a large seaduck, famed for its soft, downy feathers that are not only used by the bird to line and insulate its nest, but also by humans to stuff our quilts and pillows. It nests…
Famed for its super-fast fishing dives into the sea, the northern gannet (or gannet) is a distinctive white bird with a yellow head and black wingtips. It nests in large, noisy, smelly colonies on…
The giant house spider is one of our fastest invertebrates, running up to half a metre per second. This large, brown spider spins sheet-like cobwebs and pops up in the dark corners of houses,…
In the drama of the open spaces around her, Emily can play the role of a lifetime. She knows the wildlife of the nature reserve as intimately as Yorick knew Hamlet, and with an audience of birds,…
Our most diminutive falcon, the merlin is a pretty bird of prey. It chases small birds, flying low to the ground or hovering in the breeze because of its small size. Resident merlins are joined in…
There are several species of spider that live in our wetlands, but the water spider is the only one that spends its life under the water. In its pond habitats, it looks silvery because of the air…
Elliott has turned his passion for the natural world into study and that study into a career. He now spends his days sharing his wildlife knowledge with people of all ages, from 4-year-old’s…
Sphagnum mosses carpet the ground with colour on our marshes, heaths and moors. They play a vital role in the creation of peat bogs: by storing water in their spongy forms, they prevent the decay…
Michael manages Stanley Moss Nature Reserve; he loves the serenity of the area and the different wildlife that he can see. The area was once used for coal mining, and was drained and planted with…
Like many of our farmland birds, the corn bunting has declined in number in recent years. Spot this streaky brown, thick-billed bird singing from a wire or post - it sounds just like a set of…