As part of our commitment to giving back to our community and the environment, we are delighted to be supporting Kernow Conservation https://www.kernowconservation.org/.
Kernow Conservation are a non-profit community interest company who work in partnership with other conservation organisations, landowners and local businesses to restore wildlife and biodiversity in Cornwall.
They are involved in several projects throughout Cornwall which broadly fall into habitat restoration and management, species reintroductions, and biodiversity monitoring.
They have recently managed to raise just shy of £20k, which will allow them to launch their Beaver Project this January 2025. Beavers are true ecosystem engineers and another lost species of Cornwall slowly making a comeback. Whilst they have raised enough to launch the project, this is only 39% of their overall target, so if you would like to support their crowd funding campaign, please visit: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/kernow-con.
They are most well known for their work restoring the UK-endangered water voles in Cornwall through carefully managed re-introductions. In Cornwall, the water vole became extinct, with its last reported sightings in the 1990s, and did not return until the first reintroductions were made in Bude in 2014. Kernow Conservation started making introductions in 2022 in the south of Cornwall, and the water voles of the River Kennal have now established a remarkable stretch of habitat with activity stretching from close to the source of the river all the way to where it becomes tidal. This is a fantastic achievement, but in all of Cornwall’s 130+ river valleys, water voles are still only found in five of them so there is plenty of work still to be done. When water voles are introduced, they graze on over 227 different species including, rushes, grasses and berries and the architecture of their burrows create a drying effect on the soil and enhances the activity and number of microbes. Without water voles, wetlands and other water-adjacent areas become less biodiverse habitats with more of the same dominating grass species.
Kernow Conservation are also working to bring the Osprey back as a nesting bird in Cornwall. Whilst Ospreys do pass through Cornwall each spring and autumn, stopping over at our reservoirs and estuaries catching fish which exclusively make up their diet as they migrate to their wintering grounds in West Africa, these birds used to breed in Cornwall. They disappeared across the whole of the UK in the early 20th Century due to hunting, egg collecting and the loss of suitable nesting trees and no Osprey’s have been recorded nesting in Cornwall since as far back at the 18th Century. Osprey nests are large structures constructed on the tops of tall trees and usually made of sticks. Nests are often used inter-generationally, however, due to deforestation, many of these large trees and nests have been lost. Artificial nest platforms have been a vital part of the global recovery of the Osprey, and in the UK, have been used to success in several locations. Kernow Conservation are in the process of installing nesting platforms in suitable locations across Cornwall in the hopes of attracting breeding Ospreys during the coming migrations.
With a nature-first approach and assessing existing habitats, Kernow Conservation started their first wildlife garden project, Community Wildlife Garden in Ponsanooth, in March 2024. The project aims to educate, engage and empower volunteers from the local community to enjoy, maintain and, eventually, take ownership of their local wild space. The garden was originally established around a decade or so ago but had not been maintained so was overrun with brambles, grasses and hogweed. There was a pond but this was in a poor state of repair and wasn’t holding water properly. The garden was dominated by a single species of grass and a willow tree, the roots of which had become a problem. During 2024, with the help of volunteers, they have cleared, and planted a variety of plants, flowers and shrubs such as lavender, witch hazel, wintersweet, teasel, foxgloves sweet woodruff and more that will help to attract and support a whole host of wildlife and pollinators, installed benches and have begun establishing a wildflower meadow area. The next phase will be to remove the old pond liner, expand the pond, completely remove the troublesome willow tree, plant more shrubs and trees such as oak, apple, rowan, and alder buckthorn, and create a dead hedge border between the meadow and woodland areas with the waste.
