Between a marsh harrier banking low across a reedbed and a lapwing calling over open water, there is a moment when it is truly hard to imagine what a place used to be. A heap of colliery spoil. The Fens are being consumed by a sand quarry. Southwest London has four concrete reservoirs. These weren’t soft scenery. In the way that industrial Britain once required them to be, they were scarred, noisy, and purposeful work sites. However, they have transformed into something completely different across the nation—places where birds that were all but extinct are gradually making a comeback.
Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this change is the WWT London Wetland Centre. Constructed on four abandoned reservoirs in Barnes, it now attracts over 180 bird species annually. Kingfishers. Martins with sand. The sporadic resentment, floating through like a rumor. Though it wasn’t, it’s the kind of place that, looking back, seems inevitable. Reedbeds had to be observed in the deteriorating concrete water infrastructure. That requires a certain kind of creativity.
All across the nation, the same impulse has been at work. What was once the biggest sand and gravel quarry in Europe is being converted into one of Britain’s most important wetland reserves at Ouse Fen in Cambridgeshire. Over the course of the project, about 28 million tonnes of aggregate have been extracted from the ground, leaving behind flooded pits that are now covered in reeds and teeming with breeding birds. There are currently five percent of all bitterns in the UK that nest there, which is more than there were when the RSPB started seriously monitoring threatened species in the mid-1990s. It’s not a footnote. It is a species that has retreated from the brink.
The people in charge of these conversions claim that it’s not as complicated as it might appear. Former RSPB CEO Barbara Young reportedly said, “Just add water,” and there is truth to that statement. Fish are drawn to water. Egrets, herons, and bitterns are drawn to fish. Around flooded edges, reedbeds fill in. Waders come next. When the physical conditions are suitable, species show up on their own initiative. Chris Hudson, the site manager at Ouse Fen, put it this way: “If you build it, they will come.” The willingness of nature to reappear under the correct circumstances is almost unyielding.
The strategy has been even more unorthodox further south. The National Trust recently sank three decommissioned Thames lighters—old coal barges that had been moored in the county for over thirty years after their working lives ended—into the intertidal mudflats close to Northey Island in the Blackwater Estuary in Essex. They have produced a tiny but significant island habitat for dunlin, ringed plover, curlew, and lapwing that is filled with gravel and sediment.
The idea of abandoned industrial ships turning into bird sanctuaries is strange. However, it makes some sort of sense. The history of the estuary already included the barges. Instead of letting them slowly rust, using them as habitat seems more like common sense than innovation.
Old colliery land in the Barnsley area of northern England has experienced a similar rebirth. Old Moor, a reserve where breeding terns call in the summer and golden plover pass through in the winter, was formerly a landscape of slagheaps and pit workings, referred to informally by local birders as a rough-edged watching spot. The RSPB’s flagship northern reserve is located at Saltholme on Teesside, a thousand-acre industrial site on the estuary. On a chilly March day, while the project manager was still determining where to construct the wader scrape, grey partridges appeared in the scrub and peregrine falcons quarreled with crows overhead. Whether such projects will eventually change the way that policymakers view brownfield land is still up in the air. The birds, however, don’t appear to be anticipating that discussion.
The larger view is less cozy. Seventy species are on the red list according to the RSPB’s most recent Birds of Conservation Concern report, which is more than twice as many as when the report was first released in 1996. House martins and swifts, which return from sub-Saharan Africa every spring to find fewer insects and fewer places to nest, are among the approximately 30% of bird species in Britain that are currently experiencing some level of difficulty. Insect decline, habitat loss, and land-use change are interrelated, and conservation sites cannot address these pressures independently.
However, they take action. Observing a great white egret lift from a flooded gravel pit in Cambridgeshire demonstrates this. Some of these landscapes are still not as lovely as they once were. They are becoming more and more helpful to birds that have nowhere else to go as well as possibly to people who come to observe them, silently appreciative of what was left behind.
