Choices

For a tired dunlin completing its migration, the choices are limited. It must find somewhere to feed and renew its strength. The shoreline coming into the bird's view will be familiar, a home that will provide food and a place to survive the winter.

The stretch of muddy shore that beckons is a link in the chain of life that sustains not just one dunlin but the thousands that are moving along the migration flyway.

Take away that mud, choose to develop that place for our use – then the consequences for our dunlin are stark: move on or starve. 

Moving on is fraught with risk – the risk of not finding anywhere before the last of its energy is sapped, the risk of having to fight for feeding space with other birds, the risk of losing out, the risk of having no other choice to make.

Our choices affect, directly, the chances of life for the wildlife that depends on our special places. We believe that the right choice is to put the natural world at the heart of decisions we take about how we use the precious land in our crowded islands.

Sometimes that brings us into conflict with proposals that will wreck parts of our natural environment. But very often it is about working with planners and developers, communities and consultants to find the best way forward – to choose development that is genuinely sustainable.

A big thanks to you!

We have a proud record of success (you can read about some of them on this blog) – none of which would be possible without the support and encouragement of people like you. I talk regularly to our Conservation Officers and frontline staff around the UK. Their jobs can often be a mixture of grinding through piles of paperwork and tough talking – knowing that they have your direct support is hugely important.

Thank you for stepping up and supporting the Nature Fighting Fund appeal. This year has seen us engaging with an unprecedented number of big cases and your support is making a real difference.

A matter of life or death

The thought of the damage that can be done to our best wildlife sites by badly thought-out development is always hard for the people who care for those places. Seeing precious places lost is a personal sadness but for our wildlife it is simply a matter of life or death, the starkest of choices.

In parallel with fighting for wildlife in individual cases we are getting stuck into the proposals for the planning system in England – changes that will directly affect the future for nature’s special places and how local communities can choose to protect and enhance the natural world.

You can keep up with all of this, here, on the Saving Special Places blog.