Livestock will mimic wild ancestors to benefit wildlife on England’s first Super National Nature Reserve

Livestock will mimic wild ancestors to benefit wildlife on England’s first Super National Nature Reserve - The National Trust

brown pig with curly coat and big ears standing on the skylineon rought heath behind a tree stump — Quirky, curly coated Mangalitsa pigs are rooting around like wild boars (credit National Trust Images, Terry Bagley.)

Three years on from the ‘knitting together’ of 3,400 hectares of priority habitat to create the UK’s first-ever ‘super’ National Nature Reserve (NNR) on the Purbeck Heaths in Dorset, the National Trust is working with reserve partners on an ambitious project to create a 1,370-hectare open ‘savannah’ for free-ranging, grazing animals as it would have been thousands of years ago.
The Purbeck Heaths super reserve is a rich mosaic of lowland wet and dry heath, valley mires, acid grassland and woodland, along with coastal sand dunes, lakes and saltmarsh. Already one of the most biodiverse places in the UK it is home to thousands of species of wildlife, including all six native reptiles.
With ambitions to make the area even more nature-rich, the National Trust, RSPB, Natural England and Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty have created an open grazing site across half of the super NNR where ponies, pigs and cattle will roam freely to graze alongside deer to help shape a more diverse landscape with richer habitats. Here they can browse and turn over the soil in ways that are already benefiting wildlife from birds such as nightjars to tiny plants such as yellow centaury, while the fence removal has made the area even more accessible to people.
David Brown, National Trust lead ecologist for Purbeck said, “Over large swathes of open grassland and heath, these domestic grazers are now mimicking their wild ancestors, who would have shaped habitats in the past. We can’t bring back aurochs, the native ancestors of our domestic cattle, but we can use our 200 Red Devon cattle to graze and behave in equivalent ways. Similarly, Exmoor ponies mimic the actions of now-extinct tarpan horses, and the quirky, curly coated Mangalitsa pigs are rooting around like wild boars. We’re also discovering that by letting them get on with their own thing as much as possible, our grazing animals explore new habitats and discover different types of vegetation to eat – all of which help create a more dynamic and complex ecosystem.”