Learn more about the wildlife and wild places in Kent and beyond.
Those of you who have been following the development of the Blue Influencers Scheme being delivered by Kent Wildlife Trust may recall that KWT successfully bid for funding from The Ernest Cook Trust and the #iwill Fund and were awarded £20,000 a year for three years. This enabled the recruitment of Jenny Luddington to the role of Blue Mentor, who will be responsible for recruiting young people to become ‘Blue Influencers’.
Join Coexistence Support Officer, Julia Brant, for a day at Rother Woods as part of the South East Pine Marten Restoration Project.
This is Talk on the Wild Side. I'm Rob Smith, and in this episode, bugs matter. And bugs really do matter. Don't just take my word for it. As Sir David Attenborough no less puts it, if we and the rest of the backboned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse.
With a new UK Government now in situ, Becky Pullinger, head of land use planning at The Wildlife Trusts, reviews what is needed to deliver on one of their key manifesto pledges – to build new homes – in a nature and climate-friendly way.
How do you restore a chalk downland? Our appeal to purchase an extension to our existing Polhill Bank nature reserve offers us a unique opportunity to restore an additional 26 acres of arable land into a rare and biodiverse habitat in Sevenoaks, Kent. But how do we achieve this goal? Here are our plans.
In episode 9 of Talk on the Wild Side, Rob Smith speaks to Sir Roger Gale, MP for North Thanet and Deputy Speaker, about why the National Grid need to Rethink Sea Link. If we don't hold them to account, he warns, we would be "failing our future generations."
This year, Kent Wildlife Trust, in collaboration with Wildwood Trust and Sussex Wildlife Trust, Ashdown Forest and Forestry England, is beginning to explore the social and ecological feasibility of reintroducing pine martens to Kent and Sussex, while co-developing a ten-year strategy with a wide range of stakeholders to restore the species in the South East.
Our work at Polhill Bank has been ongoing for several years now. Over time, we have purchased more neighbouring patches of land there, adding up to around 16 hectares now under our nature-positive management. In many ways, our wilding journey in the area goes back more than a decade; in others, it’s only just begun.
