Much more than a job

After the best part of four decades, Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s Chief Executive is moving on. Here he shares his personal memories and hopes for the future.

BY JULIAN ROUGHTON

It was September 1985 and having completed an environmental degree it was clear that, without experience,

I would not secure my dream job in nature conservation. Along with everyone else on our university course I was looking to get on that first rung of the ladder. Well not quite all – one of us, Juliet Hawkins, had been appointed Suffolk’s farm wildlife adviser – the first paid role of its kind in the country. She encouraged me to move to Suffolk as the Suffolk Trust for Nature Conservation (as Suffolk Wildlife Trust then was) needed volunteers.

I was easily persuaded, not least because of the draw of Bradfield Woods. I had read Oliver Rackham’s Ancient Woodlands, which details this unique wood with its complex soils and consequently diverse plants and trees. It also uncovers the rich heritage of medieval woodbanks, boundary pollards and thousand-year-old ash stools. Fifteen years earlier – at a Public Inquiry –Rackham’s research had saved Bradfield Woods from the bulldozer as the wood’s national importance was made evident.

Into the woods

I was keen to see the wood’s compelling combination of natural and cultural history and my offer of help was grasped with enthusiasm by Pete Fordham, the warden of Bradfield Woods, as he needed extra hands to help with coppicing. I was given the use of an old caravan at the front of the wood until I could find my own accommodation. So began a memorable 18 months at Bradfield Woods.

My volunteer role would best be described as a labouring woodsman. I had neither the experience nor training to use a chainsaw, so I cleared up cut hazel stems and stacked ash logs. It was, and still is, a physically demanding role that has changed little over hundreds of years. At that time ash stems went for tool handles at the Whelnetham Rake Factory, now closed, and hazel was in demand by thatchers – even the woodash from the fires was used – going to potters to make glazes.

I was not the only one looking for paid work in the mid-1980s. High unemployment led to the creation of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) to help give young people new skills for work. The Trust had set up an MSC funded programme to train graduate ecologists along with practical roles in woodland management that would produce future tree surgeons and woodsmen.

This MSC programme was extraordinarily successful in nurturing young conservationists – amongst former colleagues are an international conservation charity CEO, a director at Natural England and Plantlife’s regional conservation director. The need for young graduates to gain practical experience remains and I’m delighted that Suffolk Wildlife Trust offers training placements to this day.

Searching for dormice

I took a role as a ecological surveyor and in this capacity initiated Suffolk’s first dormouse survey. Suffolk was on the edge of their range and there had been precious few records since Victorian times. Since the Trust was encouraging traditional woodland management it was important to know where they still existed.

Dormice are strictly nocturnal and highly elusive so finding them proved to be much more difficult than I had envisaged. Today survey techniques have been perfected with footprint tunnels and dormouse boxes but I was using large wire mesh cage traps placed in the hazel canopy and baited with apple.

My first priority was to find out

Thirty years ago Bradfield Woods was a stronghold for nightingale.

These were magical days with the wood to myself and nightingales singing all around

how dormice were using Bradfield Woods and which ages of coppice. As the apple bait was deliciously attractive to blackbirds I had to be in the woods shortly after dawn and back again at dusk to re-open them. Yellow-necked mice also loved the apples and when caught were inclined to bite vigorously so I underwent a steep learning curve! It was many weeks before I caught my first dormouse but these were magical days with the wood to myself and nightingales singing all around.

Thankfully, my ability to find dormice improved and by autumn I was surveying ancient woods for the distinctively eaten hazel nuts that are evidence of dormice. I met older people for whom dormice had been familiar in their youth such as a former thatcher who found a snoring, hibernating dormouse and an elderly lady who, as a child, kept them as pets. She described how, when her dormouse fell into a torpor (as they do in low temperatures) she would roll the unfortunate animal along a table for entertainment.

PHIL MORLEY

Frustration

After dormice my next role was coordinating the Trust’s MSC activities in the Brecks managing two teams that were keeping heaths clear of pines. There were no environmental schemes or support for owners of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) so the heaths had not been grazed for fifty years and the increasing tree cover was threatening specialist Breckland plants and birds.

The Trust worked on the Elveden Estate heaths, such as Deadman’s Grave and

Lakenheath Warren. These places felt so remote with their stone curlew, bubbling call of common curlew and, the occasional, ‘wet my lips’ song of quail. It was wonderful that such places still existed and Suffolk

Trust for Nature Conservation played a pivotal role until the return of grazing to these heaths.

Away from the heaths, specialist Breckland plants were under tremendous threat from agriculture and development. At

Brandon was a tiny remnant of a once extensive heath with the UK’s largest population of field wormwood,

Artemesia campestris. It was a sad sight – a quarter of an acre surrounded by light industrial units.

Elsewhere was Lakenheath Poors Fen – 12 acres of species-rich fen surrounded by drained arable land. It was a SSSI but the Internal Drainage Board then had little regard for such designations. One morning I found the surrounding dykes deep-dredged to the chalk with dozens of eels writhing in spoil dumped on the fen. Conservation was battling to safeguard the fragments of natural habitat and many of these, in a hostile landscape, were too small to protect the species that made them special. It was a war of attrition – marsh pea disappeared from Lakenheath Poors Fen and bog myrtle from Pashford Poors Fen as these sites became drier.

ALAMY

From trying in vain to catch them, to leading the Trust’s re-introduction campaign, dormice have punctuated Julian’s career.

SWT

“Rewilding” at Black

Bourn is just one of the groundbreaking projects

Julian has overseen.

Julian and the late, great David Bellamy, discuss conservation at Redgrave & Lopham Fen.

STEVE AYLWARD

Working in partnership – Julian (centre) with (left) James Robinson, RSPB and Paul Forecast, National Trust.

Fighting for nature

Fortunately, times were changing, and in the late 1980s John Gummer (Lord Deben) as Minister for Agriculture introduced Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) with three in Suffolk – the Brecks, the Broads and the Suffolk River Valleys. Rewarding landowners to look after wildlife sites was a transformation to what had been a purely agriculturally focused policy.

When I returned to Suffolk Wildlife Trust in 1995 (after seven years at the Woodland Trust) it was clear that much more was possible thanks to growing public support. New agri-environment schemes were enabling the restoration of neglected meadows, heaths and fens after decades of abandonment. Places we had thought had been irreparably damaged were being brought back to life. At Redgrave & Lopham Fen, Suffolk Wildlife Trust and Essex & Suffolk Water relocated the public water supply borehole that had sucked the life out of the fen. And as spring water returned to the fen so did species presumed lost forever – roundleaved sundew, marsh fragrant orchid and scarce emerald dragonfly. Marsh harrier and bearded tits bred for the first time – probably for a century.

Conservation organisations were now looking beyond their current reserves to create new habitats. At Lakenheath, the RSPB turned carrot fields into wetlands and Suffolk Wildlife Trust came to the aid of bitterns by transforming a 20 acre reserve into the 132 acres of Hen Reedbeds.

For the last twenty years Suffolk Wildlife Trust has been rewilding thanks to legacy gifts and support from our members enabling the purchase of hundreds of acres of arable land. New wildlife habitats have emerged – acid grassland at Captain's Wood, native woodland at Arger Fen, rough grassland and scrub at Black Bourn Valley and reedbed and wetlands at Carlton Marshes. Expanding the size of our nature reserves has enabled more complex habitat mosaics to develop and former arable fields now support orchids, great crested newts, lizards and avocet.

A wild future

Nature reserves have been hugely successful at saving special places and species while I have been at the Trust, but much needs to be done to reverse the declines of wildlife in the wider countryside. The decision to shift farming support to ‘public money for public goods’ is a starting point to the changes that our wildlife needs. There is growing evidence that the landscape use of pesticides is driving insect and bird declines not just in Suffolk but across Europe. There are farmers doing things differently and working to conserve species – these are our future allies.

In Suffolk there is so much that we can all do to bring wildlife back – whether newts in a garden pond or hedgehogs in a rough corner. Suffolk Wildlife Trust helps nurture a love of nature amongst thousands of families and young people that come to our centres and, hopefully, leave inspired to make a difference.

I love to see buzzards soaring across Suffolk’s skies. Not just for their innate beauty but because they represent the resilience of nature. These majestic birds, once pushed to the margins by persecution and DDT, are now common again. It fills me with optimism that we can tackle the environmental challenges that face us and so enable nature to bounce back.

Find out more about our ongoing efforts for dormouse in Suffolk at suffolkwildlifetrust.org