Heathland

Heathland is one of our most threatened wildlife habitats: an open landscape of gorse, bracken, heathers and grasses, often with scattered birch and pine trees.

In the past heathlands were valuable to local people for grazing sheep, goats, horses, donkeys and geese. All sorts of useful products, from gorse for burning, bracken for animal bedding, sand and gravel for building, to wild foods such as blackberries, edible fungi and elderberries, used to be gathered from heathland.

However many of these open areas were enclosed and fertilised to create more farmland, or planted up with conifers. Other heathlands, especially in southern England, provided sites for house building. Even where they were left alone they turned naturally into woodland once their traditional use by local people as grazing land ceased. Today many heaths are protected as nature reserves and local Wildlife Trusts are working to restore heaths, often by cutting down the birch and pine trees which now cover them. This work is vital if our rare and unique heathland wildlife is to survive.

Did you know?

More than half of all our lowland heathlands have been destroyed during the last one hundred years. Many of these heaths have histories dating back thousands of years and the specialised wildlife that depends on these habitats can live nowhere else.

Wildlife to look out for:

Birds: stonechat, Dartford warbler (rare), nightjar, yellowhammer, linnet, skylark, woodlark, green woodpecker.

Mammals: rabbits, hares, stoats, weasels.

Amphibians and reptiles: common lizard, sand lizard (rare), adder, smooth snake (rare), slowworm, common toad, natterjack toad (rare).

Plants: Bell heather, common heather (ling), gorse, bracken, harebell, tormentil, lichens.

Minibeasts: Bumblebees, solitary wasps, beetles such as sexton beetle and minotaur beetle, spiders, grasshoppers and crickets, butterflies such as small copper and silver-studded blue (rare).