We're losing the biodiversity that makes our world rich. The main cause? Habitat loss.

How do you make a water vole feel welcome? No seriously, how do you? It's a question I have to ask myself regularly. Not just water voles, but avocets, bitterns and dozens of other species. Because creating homes for wildlife is basically what I do.

If you want to encourage newts into your garden, you dig a pond. If you want to encourage bitterns, you’ve got to create a wetland of at least 12 hectares and fill it with reeds, because that's the minimum size of reedbed they'll nest in.

The RSPB creates homes for wildlife at more than 200 nature reserves. At the last count we were making a home for 13,300 species on our reserves, and of those, only about 3% are birds. More than half are insects and a quarter fungi.

Huge amounts of research goes into discovering how to create just the right conditions for these species. We're among the best at what we do, but we can only do it with your support.

Rob Coleman.
Senior Sites Manager – Titchwell and Snettisham Reserves.

growing life on the farm.

photo of a Skylark

It’s odd to think about farmland being a lost habitat because there is farmland everywhere – three quarters of the UK is farmed in fact. But something has been lost from our countryside. Since the end of WW2, the drive to maximise food production has led to massive intensification of the farmed landscape, and the result has been a catastrophic drop in the number of farmland birds – overall a 53% drop since 1966. There’s been a 10% drop in the last 5 years alone.

We can’t turn back the clock, but at the RSPB’s Hope Farm we work hard to find methods that farmers can employ to encourage wildlife without impacting their profits. It’s been a huge success, but so much more needs to be done. Our skylark patches, small bare gaps in the field, have quadrupled the number of skylarks at Hope Farm.

Our yellowhammers have doubled, and our linnets quintupled – all thanks to the innovative farming methods we conceive and trial here. We need to find more solutions, like the skylark patches, wild bird cover and flower-rich field margins that are working at Hope Farm, and we need to encourage more farmers to adopt them.

turning the tide.

photo of sea levels

help save freshwater habitats from rising seas.
your £300 could build seawalls, and defend bittern and bearded tit habitat.

Right now, the homes of bearded tits and water voles are in the direct path of disaster. Coastal erosion and rising sea levels, symptoms of our changing climate, threaten some of our most precious coastal reserves.

Work we’re doing on our Titchwell Marsh reserve on the North Norfolk coast points to a novel solution. The sea is creeping closer and closer to the reserve’s freshwater habitats – a place where bitterns boom in spring and warblers cling to reeds and sing their hearts out.

If the sea breaches the reserve’s crumbling sea defences, the special habitat these species rely on will be utterly destroyed. The radical plan here is to realign and reinforce the coastal defences to protect the freshwater habitats, PLUS, we are deliberately breaching the sea wall, to allow the sea into just one area of the reserve in a controlled and predictable way. The inundated area will create a new saltmarsh – ideal habitat for redshanks and great protection for our new seawalls.

restoring wilderness to the Flows.

photo of a deer

restore the precious peatland habitat of the Flow Country.
your £300 could help fell the trees choking life from the bog.

Become a pioneer

The home of short-eared owls, sundews, greenshanks and water voles is trapped beneath two million trees –as a pioneer, you can help us free it.

Forsinain and Dyke are newly acquired extensions to our Forsinard Flows nature reserve in Caithness and Sutherland. Here, in the 1970s, the very heart of one of our globally important wildernesses was seriously damaged when forestry plantations were established. They drained the water, and the life, from the rare blanket bog habitat, and made it uninhabitable for the wildlife that once called this place home.

The RSPB has been buying back areas of forest and restoring them for nature since 1995. After a huge amount of effort, the restored areas of Forsinard Flows are once again teeming with the special wildlife that depends on this habitat: golden eagles soar overhead, curlews make their strange bubbling cry, and male hen harriers perform their spectacular sky dance above their nests.

But there is much to be done, and right now, two million trees must be felled. It’s an enormous task involving state- of-the-art forestry machines capable of working on the soft peatland ground.

Become a pioneer
Photo of an RSPB pioneer

help find new methods to bring life back to the UK’s farmland.
your £300 could fund vital new research at Hope Farm.