Local Nature Recovery Strategy for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland

 By law all councils need to come up with a Local Nature Recovery Strategy, as laid down in the Environment Act 2021. For Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland this is being led by Paul Killip, from Leicestershire CC.

Local Nature Recovery Strategies are a new mandatory system of spatial strategies that will:

• Map the most valuable existing areas for nature.
• Establish priorities.
• Map proposals for specific actions to drive nature’s recovery and achieve wider environmental benefits.

Why bother?

• The State of Nature 2023 report reveals that over 26% of terrestrial mammals in the UK are facing the threat of extinction.
• Birds are one of the most severely impacted groups, with 43% of species facing risk of extinction.
• Species like the Turtle Dove and Curlew have seen catastrophic declines.
• Pollinator species have decreased by 18% on average, while crop pest control invertebrates, such as the 2-Spot Ladybird, have declined by more than 34%.
• Freshwater habitats are particularly vulnerable, with species such as the European Eel and Atlantic Salmon facing dramatic population declines. The European Eel has seen a 95% decrease.
• In future Local Planning Authorities will have to take account of nature recovery areas when making planning decisions.  It would be good to think improvement initiatives would involve members of the public so we could get some local ownership going.

The LNRS aims to achieve 8 Strategic Aims:

1. Increase the area and diversity of land and water managed for wildlife in Leicestershire, Leicester, and Rutland.
2. Increase biodiversity by improving the ecological condition (habitat quality) of existing areas for nature conservation.
3. Re-instate natural processes and utilise Nature-Based-Solutions to support nature and climate resilience.
4. Protect and enhance green and blue spaces within urban habitats.
5. Promote sustainable agriculture and support local food systems.
6. Improve ecological connectivity by establishing coherent and resilient ecological networks at scale.
7. Reduce major pressures and threats to nature including Invasive Non- Native Species control.
8. Improve our understanding of the State of Nature and actively monitor habitats/species change over time.

The strategy has identified 8 priority habitats:

1. Woodland
2. Freshwater
3. Grasslands
4. Urban
5. Agricultural
6. Open mosaic
7. Nature networks
8. Geodiversity

Extensive studies have mapped the whole of Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland seeking to identify areas for nature recovery.  The maps are available to look at online, including one where the general public can identify areas they think worthy of mention.

Following a session with Paul Killip LFoE have reviewed both the draft and the actual report and submitted suggestions for improvements.  The next version is due out in July so we look forward to seeing this strategy coming into being.

Our schedule of park visits for Friday evening surveys and Saturday afternoon stalls

To give an award to the most nature-friendly park, we need to assess their current state and survey people who use the park. This is our schedule for visiting each of the parks:   

	Fridays (evening visits looking at habitats)	Saturdays (stalls with questionnaire)
Hamilton	5th May	6th May
Evington	12th May	13th May
Spinney Hills	19th May	20th May
Willowbrook	26th May	27th May
Humberstone	9th June	10th June
Stokes Wood	16th June	17th June
Appleton	30th June	1st July
Reserve	7th July	8th July

Friday evenings in May will start at 7:30pm and in June at 8pm. We will be starting later in June as we are aiming to check bat populations so we need the twilight to arrive for them to come out.  

Our Saturday afternoon stalls will start at 3pm. We are aiming to survey park users while we entertain their children by making wildflower "seed bombs".

If you can spare the time to join us in any of the parks, especially if you are knowledgeable about an aspect of wildlife and can come along on a Friday evening, you would be very welcome to join us!

Pesticide spraying

At a recent Parish Council meeting in my village the PC voted to carry on spraying round the village tennis court and play area with weedkiller.  When I enquired what the weedkiller is that they use I was told it was glyphosate and I was also told that it was ok because it is what the County Council use.

I wrote to Leicester City Council and to Leicestershire County Council asking them to stop spraying with glyphosate as lots of other Councils have already stopped spraying.

Leicestershire County Council responded saying they had put the spraying (of the highways) on hold and it was under review and they would let me know the result of the review and their decision about spraying.

Leicester City Council were not quite so helpful in as much as they are carrying on spraying and explained their reasons why they had to.  Basically, they said they had tried and researched other methods but they were too costly and time consuming so they needed to keep spraying.

This is an ongoing project and we are formulating our response to Leicester City Council at the moment.  Watch this space….

Rewilding book reviews

During lockdown, a few of us have turned to reading books about wildlife while we haven’t been able to visit wild places. There has been a spate of books about rewilding over the last few years, as interest grows in the idea of restoring nature rather than just conserving what is left. Here are some of the books we have enjoyed.

 

FERAL

By George Monbiot 

All across the world nature is in retreat and there are few countries where that process is as far advanced as in the UK. Our environment is shorn of a large proportion of the species that used to thrive here. Feral catalogues and mourns what we have lost, but it also presents a vision of what we might have again. George Monbiot points out that in this country even landscapes that are seen as wild and natural are in fact mainly unnatural ecological deserts. He advocates allowing nature to reclaim a lot of the UK’s deforested uplands, which are currently maintained as barren deserts by management for grouse shooting, deer stalking or only very marginally productive sheep farming.  In part this would be about simply allowing regeneration of natural tree cover, but to establish truly thriving natural ecosystems it would also need to include active reintroduction of key species, particularly larger predators and large herbivores. Rewilding the UK’s uplands in this way would help to combat climate change, by sequestering a lot of carbon and would also help to prevent flooding in more populated areas, by slowing run off. I found the book inspiring.  I believe that protecting and restoring woodland and peat bog has an important role to play in helping to combat climate change, but like Monbiot I also long for a return of some real wildness to my world.  

 

WILDING

The Return of Nature to a British Farm

By Isabella Tree 

This book tells the story of an unproductive farm, whose owners take the decision to stop farming in any traditional sense and instead let nature return. They make some interventions, like sowing areas of wildflowers and filling ecological niches long left empty in our wild spaces by introducing small herds of large herbivores. But their most radical action is to choose to do nothing most of the time. They stop cutting the hedges; the hedgerows spread into wide corridors and nightingales move in. They stop draining a wet field; it turns into a boggy area with wildlife they have never seen there before. If you’ve ever read the reports of what is happening to our biodiversity and despaired, this book is for you. It left me quite emotional and I think the main emotion was relief. Maybe we haven’t broken everything beyond repair after all. Maybe nature can come back.

 

REBIRDING     

Restoring Britain's Wildlife

By Benedict Macdonald 

Benedict Macdonald uses the current fortunes of the British bird population to analyse the current state of our countryside and land use and investigate why we are doing so badly in contrast to our neighbours across the Channel and in Eastern Europe. He uses the evidence from Wilding by Isabella Tree about the success of the Knepp estate in increasing biodiversity, to advocate a bolder use of our outdoor spaces including national parks, with better control of deer populations, introduction of beavers and reductions in sheep and cow herds. He suggests that conservation bodies must change their priorities to buying larger areas of land which will give bird populations, currently at unsustainable levels, a better chance of recovery. The reintroduction of pelicans to a greatly enlarged wetland in Somerset is an appealing vision.

 

NATURE'S ARCHITECT 

The Beaver's Return to our Wild Landscapes

By Jim Crumley 

Jim Crumley is one of Scotland's foremost nature writers and one of the earliest advocates of beaver re-introduction. He describes the earliest personal sighting of beavers in the river Tay who had unofficially reintroduced themselves and visits other sites in Scotland where controlled introduction of beavers has been allowed, such as

an historical experiment on the Isle of Bute and a contemporary release at the Aigas Field Centre. He discusses some of the benefits to river management which might occur as a result and reviews literature from Canada about the role of beavers in their landscape. At regular intervals he returns to the river bank to watch beavers at work and play.

 

BRINGING BACK THE BEAVER

The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways

By Derek Gow 

In Isabella Tree’s review of this book, she describes the author as ‘a wry, profane truth teller who is equal parts yeoman farmer, historical ecologist, and pirate’. I can’t improve on that description! This book helped me to understand the role of the beavers in our ecosystems, which I hadn’t properly understood before. It made me hopping mad that the UK government is so ridiculously averse to change and that large landowners still have so much power in this country. But most of all, it really made me laugh. Look out for the explanation of how to sex a beaver – I laughed until I cried.

 

By Malcolm Hunter, Alison Skinner and Hannah Wakley