A family's legacy nature for

BY

The Applebys are an inspiring family. As well as being Life Members, they have each pledged to leave a gift in their Will to Suffolk Wildlife Trust, so that future generations can enjoy Suffolk’s wildlife and wild places like they have. We spoke to them recently about their lifelong passion for nature and their hopes for the future of wildlife in our county.

Nature: part of the family to appreciate the natural world too. Instead of toys, they bought them binoculars and a bird book. The girls became fascinated with wildlife, and soon all the family’s free time was spent

Nature was always a part of life for Pam and David Appleby and their daughters Melinda and Claire. Now 94, Pam spent her 1930s childhood by the river Blackwater in Essex, wandering along the river, making dens, climbing trees, and watching wildlife. She remembers scanning the sea wall carefully for adders basking in the sun.

Then, in 1939, war was declared, and things changed. Bomb shelters were built in Pam’s schoolgrounds and movement around the country was restricted, but Pam recalls how “the birds and animals still had their freedom”. She took so much joy in this.

A few years later, Pam met and married David, an architect who believed passionately that building design could integrate nature. When they had children, the couple wanted their daughters exploring the north Norfolk coast. The family would sit on the sea wall with naturalist and moth expert Peter Clarke (who founded the Holme Bird Observatory), counting flocks of migrant birds flying in from the sea to spend winter in East Anglia. The girls carried their interest into school, too, setting up a natural history society and entering the school in the ‘Better Britain’ competition.

Wild memories

Pam clearly remembers how one year, not long after the terns had laid their eggs, the tide was exceptionally high at RSPB Titchwell. Their younger daughter, Claire, helped warden Norman Sills collect the eggs before the tide reached them and returned them to their correct scrapes as soon as danger had passed.

The whole family was passionate about local wildlife. “I can remember my father carefully putting back a nest of mice he’d inadvertently dug out of the compost,” recalls Melinda. “There were always sick and injured birds being nursed back to health by my mother. During the hard winter of 1962-63, my parents rescued an exhausted redwing and helped it regain strength. The frozen compost heap was dug up and thawed on the warm floor to feed the bird, along with grated apple. After six weeks, the redwing left in great condition. The RSPB wrote and congratulated my parents on this recovery.”

From these strong, nature-loving roots, Melinda and Claire built successful careers around the natural world, Claire in conservation, academia and wildlife illustration and Melinda in the field of conservation and farmland advice, and as a writer of landscape poetry and prose. Melinda spent ten years as conservation adviser to farmers in Suffolk before joining the National

Farmer’s Union as their first conservationist, going on to serve on the boards English Nature and Natural England. Claire set up the first county biological records centre driven by computerised mapping, and later worked for the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge.

“I followed a career in conservation,” explained Melinda, “always trying to build bridges between nature and people to share my enthusiasm for the natural world and to bring about policy change. But as biodiversity continues to fall, I feel that the ownership of land, with sympathetic management, is the best way of guaranteeing some future for wildlife.”

Nature in common

Over the years, the family have owned many gardens, and all have been managed first and foremost for wildlife. Pam is still looking after hedgehogs and takes in sick birds and hungry bees; she always keeps a shoebox in the airing cupboard ready for stunned or sick birds to have a warm, quiet place to recover. All three regularly monitor wildlife in their gardens and Claire is actively rewilding hers. For her, her career in wildlife has been supported by a deep spiritual connection to nature.

“I feel scientific facts on their own don’t motivate people to act,” explained Claire. “Indigenous cultures encode conservation practice into their creating an effective way to drive action. A community saying,

Nature And Mythology Meet

Of all species, the lapwing holds a special place for the family. For them, it is a symbol of how the natural world has shifted in their lifetimes as well as tying all their interests together: Pam’s memories, Melinda’s writing, and Claire’s interest in nature and mythology.

As a child during World War II, Pam spent her time exploring the meadow next to her house. She remembers how she had to take care not to tread on lapwing's nests, which were abundant in the area. A generation on and for Melinda and Claire, lapwing are now mostly winter visitors.

Pam remembers scanning the sea wall carefully for adders basking in the sun.

All three worry that young people growing up today will only ever see lapwings on a nature reserve. The lapwing even holds a place in Melinda and Claire’s interests in mythology, through the myth of the ‘Quirin stone’. Sacred to witches, these stones were said to be found in lapwing nests, and if someone put one under your pillow you would supposedly speak your secrets in your sleep!

Lapwing, voice of the meadows, ghost of a landscape.

Dream of a time when your call rang out above silvered land. Thread of birds through fields, river of sound rising, coiling from marsh, melting into mist. Gone lapwing, flopwing, peewit, piewipe, hornpie.

‘you’re not allowed to fish here because it’s sacred’ is better at protecting a space than saying ‘you’re not allowed to fish here because it’s a spawning ground’. For me, nature is spiritual: in fact, in many indigenous languages there is no separate word for ‘nature’ as distinct from humans, as humans and nature are

Towards a Wilder Suffolk Pam, Melinda and Claire all a strong vision and hopes for a Wilder Suffolk. The whole family believes in the importance of creating more space for nature, whether through more sympathetic development or doing simple things at home, as well as setting land aside at scale so that wildlife has a home. They believe that land should be able to support nature alongside other uses in an integrated way, a view that was shared by David, whose designs for houses always included space for nature to thrive.

The family feel confident that by leaving Suffolk Wildlife Trust a legacy, they can have their vision of a Wilder Suffolk realised by supporting future land purchases.

“It’s so that wildlife always has somewhere to go,” explained Pam. “Nature should be everywhere, not just a visitor attraction that people drive to. We want to see nature spread around the county, not just at a few sites.”

To find out how a gift in your Will could help Suffolk's wildlife, please contact Amy Rushton on 01473 890089. Thank you.