Saving Our Heathlands: Restoration Underway to Help the Nightjar Thrive

Thank you to everyone who supported our Help our Heathlands appeal last year. Your kind gift helped us to raise a huge £47,849 towards helping to restore our lowland heathlands – protecting the wildlife that depends on them, including one of our most fascinating summer visitors, the nightjar.

The nightjar is a threatened and declining species that relies on open heathland habitat to breed. Your support is helping us create and maintain the conditions these extraordinary birds need to thrive.

Greno Woods

At Greno Woods, we’ve been carrying out extensive heathland management to improve nightjar habitat. More than 20 volunteers helped clear 0.5 hectares of bracken on our heathland creation site, while a further 1.5 hectares of heathland has benefited from scrub management, including the removal of young trees and ring-barking larger ones to keep the habitat open and suitable for breeding birds.

Encouragingly, this spring we recorded two male nightjars establishing territories within the area – a promising sign that these restoration efforts are making a difference.

Wyming Brook and Fox Hagg

At Wyming Brook and Fox Hagg, we’ve continued clearing bracken and scrub that was encroaching onto heathland, with more volunteer work planned throughout the summer.

During our nightjar survey in May, volunteers were thrilled to witness some exciting behaviour: after hearing the distinctive wing-clapping display and the birds’ unmistakable “coo-icing” calls, three nightjars emerged from the reserve woodland onto the nearby moorland. Two birds chased the third before all three disappeared back into the woodland.

Blacka Moor

Elsewhere, at Blacka Moor, we’ve been restoring heathland alongside a stream where flooding had begun to erode the banks (also supported with funding and volunteers from Vp plc). Using cut scrub from the heathland, we created natural brash bundles to stabilise the banks, helping to reduce erosion, prevent sediment entering the watercourse and safeguard the surrounding habitat for years to come.

The benefits of this work will extend far beyond nightjars. By restoring lowland heathland, we are also supporting a host of threatened species, including the green hairstreak butterfly, common lizard and the nationally scarce bilberry bumblebee.

None of this would be possible without your support. Thank you for helping us protect and restore these special landscapes and giving species like the nightjar a better chance to flourish.