Taking a walk on the wild side

8:41am Tuesday 6th May 2008

Walking and wildlife. The two go hand in hand. If you ramble through the countryside, there will be wildlife all around for you to see and hear, assuming you know what you're looking for and listening to and where to find it.

A fairly ordinary outing can be given a thrilling new dimension by an unexpected sighting of a green woodpecker taking off from a tree just ahead of you, or a weasel undulating through the grass beside the path.

The fields and woods are full of wildlife. But you are likely to find most of it at the reserves. In these places are nurtured the special environments which encourage plants, animals, birds and insects. And most of them are accessible to the general public.

There are 500 of these areas all around Great Britain listed and described in Wildlife Walks, a book advising what there is to be found on days out at the nature reserves run by Britain's various Wildlife Trusts (Think Books, £14.99). If you're planning a walk and don't just want to yomp along with eyes to the front (well some do - the getting there being more important than what's along the way), it's worth consulting this before you set off.

In its colourful, information-packed pages you will discover, for instance, that Grass Wood near Grassington mainly comprises ash and hazel with beeches and firs. Inhabitants include roe deer, badgers and foxes. Here you're likely to hear, and possibly see, the green and greater-spotted woodpecker, along with the nuthatch and tree creeper.

Southerscales, near Ingleton, features a vast expanse of limestone pavement with a rich diversity of plants within the grikes (the cracks between the clints) - which will be familiar to anyone who has ever climbed the steep steps up the side of Malham Cove and picked their way carefully across the top of the cliff over which a waterfall once cascaded.

It will take you up to two hours to stroll around the Southerscales reserve at a leisurely pace, keeping your eyes open in spring for ravens pairing up and defending their territory, or watching smaller birds building their nests in the walls and trees. And in the autumn, when the heather sways in the breeze, you can look out for fieldfares and redwings hunting for food.

If you want to venture eastwards, head for Wheldrake Ings near York, a seasonal wetland which is flooded annually by the River Derwent. Apparently botanists love this location, where the white flowers of meadowsweet brighten the hay meadow in summer and the burgundy heads of great burnet give splashes of colour among the long grasses.

You might see a kingfisher here, flashing past along the banks of the river, or maybe a barn owl hunting over the meadow. In the winter wildfowl and waders converge on the place.

Continue further east, and at Flamborough Cliffs you come to the most northerly coastal chalk cliffs in the UK at a site made specially important by the algae and lichen communities. Along the relatively short stretch of coastline in the care of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (which manages 80 sites) can be found 20 per cent of Flamborough Head's breeding sea bird population, including puffins with their cute beaks filled with small fish.

The hedges and scrubland at the top of the cliff are home to the yellow-hammer and linnet, and rare visitors like the red-backed shrike, barred warbler and wryneck have been reported here.

A unique reserve run by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust is Spurn, the sandy spit stretching into the Humber Estuary which is home to the lifeboat crew and their families and, in winter, to thousands of visiting birds.

This can be a full day out, given the driving time from West Yorkshire along the M62 past Hull and the seven-mile circuit of the peninsula, which can take four hours or more to explore, depending on how long you linger with your binoculars.

There are bird hides dotted around the place, and several waymarked footpaths. But the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust warns that at high tides the mid-section of the reserve will be underwater, making access to the point (and a retreat from it) impossible until the tide goes out again.

Head west, across the border into Lancashire, and there is more low-lying land at the Wigan Flashes, a marshy landscape with acres of meadow, heath and mossland in the middle of an urban area. The trust suggests that while you're looking at rare orchids or other wildflowers, you might be lucky enough to hear a bittern booming.

You just might be so inspired by your visits to Wildlife Trust reserves up and down the country (there are more than 2,200 in the UK) that you decide to sign up as a volunteer and help to look after one of those close to where you live.

Last year about 35,000 people gave some of their time and energy to helping the trusts do their work - wall building, bashing down the scrub, developing IT systems, providing legal advice, promoting campaigns and doing their bit in many other ways.

But even if you don't want to do that, a good way to support what they do is spend a day out at some of the places they care for and help to make their work worthwhile.

l Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (ywt.org.uk) can be contacted on (01904) 659570.

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