Places where nature can build a home

Nature Reserve Campaign 2023

What is a nature reserve? A nature reserve is a place where wildlife can live, breed, bring up its young. Where birds can sing, hares can box and owls can hoot.

It is a place where plants can grow, undisturbed by development of towns and cities. It is a place where our own native plants can flourish, while invasive species are pushed back. It can be one huge wetland or woodland, or a range of habitats, like Brockholes, Mere Sands Wood and Wigan Flashes.

Most of our reserves have a variety of habitats, offering feeding grounds and safe areas for creatures who live on the reserve or are just popping in for an hour or a couple of days.

Our nature reserves mean so much

Our 40 nature reserves offer so much to wildlife and people, but how many people realise the vitally important work that is carried out on every one of those wild places every day of the year? Our new campaign to spread the word starts here...

While Nature has taken over vast industrial complexes, it still needs a little help from its LWT friends to retain fabulous habitats. Some of our reserves provide homes for the willow tit, Britain’s most endangered small bird, the Manchester argus, a butterfly that hadn’t flown in the county for 150 years, and many rare and unusual species, orchids are everywhere in summer.

Our reserves are also inhabited during the day by volunteers. Volunteers create rides – or pathways – for handsome fritillaries, plant vibrant sundews, put up boxes for pied flycatchers and seed wildflower meadows for buzzing bees and flittering butterflies. They also mend fences and gates and tidy paths for another important element of our nature reserves, our visitors.

Welcome to Lancashire wildlife

The first aim our Nature Reserves campaign is to welcome more visitors, who will support the work that the Lancashire Wildlife Trust is doing. They can come along to the reserves and tell all their friends what glorious places they are.

Of course, you may be lucky enough to see rarities on our reserves but what you will see, hear and feel is the nature within the old boundaries of Lancashire encapsulated with 11 hectares (Over Kellet Pond) or 111 hectares (Little Woolden Moss).  

Raising the profile

It is important that the work on individual reserves is recognised as part of our wider work across Lancashire. The Nature Reserves Campaign will raise the profile of all of our reserves but it is up to our members and supporters to get the message out to the many people who haven’t had wonderful experiences in these wild places.

Our visitors are as varied as the wildlife – young families and school groups share hides with birders and other naturalists, fungi experts comb our woodlands in autumn while work parties from local businesses balsam bash nearby, walkers and cyclists politely make way for each other, students use real-life encounters to bring exam papers to life.

Our nature reserves are no secret, they are detailed here on our website and you can find more about the ones you can visit and the ones you can pop into with your well-behaved dog. Some can be visited with a licence and we can arrange trips to private reserves for interested groups and individuals.

Come along to our reserves and don't be afraid to ask questions, you might just want to get involved.