It’s always good to encounter enthusiasm, and recently I did at a Technical Advisory Group, no less! The focus of our attention was Nature After Minerals – an initiative involving the RSPB, the minerals industry, local authorities, Natural England and the Environment Agency. The website is well worth a look; afterminerals.
One of my earliest best places for finding birds was a small gravel pit in the Stour Valley in Kent. Near enough to get to on my own, far enough to be an adventure. It felt like I’d discovered it. I rarely met anyone else, the odd local with their dog and we’d exchange furtive glances as we were probably trespassing, a bit. I saw my first reed warbler there and, one winter, an immaculate drake goosander. For me, it was part of the process of being hooked by nature.
After that I rather took gravel pits for granted for years. They became a line in the story of wider conservation ‘and great-crested grebes benefited from more and more new gravel pits’. A rather glib line that hides a fundamental truth – if great crested grebes benefit – so, too, will other wildlife.
Just up the A1 from Sandy (home of the RSPB’s headquarters) lies a patchwork of gravel pits near St Neots. Paxton Pits hasn’t just benefited wildlife but has become a hugely popular place for local people – it is supported by the Friends of Paxton Pits Nature Reserve, a thousand-strong local group sharing a love of a special place created in their back yard, and crucially, involving them in its future.
Nature After Minerals is a rare creature, conservationists, planners and regulators and an industry delivering real, tangible, life enhancing places that are hooching with wildlife and will help to hook the next generation into a love of nature.