UK Government cherishes its wildlife

By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent

Bats, spiders and a rare moth are among the creatures expected to benefit from a UK initiative.

Butterflies like the comma are made welcome

The government is setting targets to improve the lot of wildlife living on land which it owns, the Government Estate.

This covers 1% of the UK's entire land mass, including prisons and derelict industrial sites.

The estate owns more than 200 sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs).

A year ago the government published its Framework For Sustainable Development On The Government Estate.

It has already agreed targets for travel, water, environmental management systems, and now biodiversity.

Money boxes

Work continues to agree targets for waste, energy, procurement, social issues and estate management.

The biodiversity targets include:

• assessing and improving the condition of the estate's SSSIs (the jewels in the crown of UK conservation)
• the production of biodiversity action plans by every relevant government department
• setting a biodiversity target in contracts for new and refurbished government buildings.

Symbolically, the targets should have an effect in the very heart of Whitehall itself.

Sheep graze Wymott's pasture

Treasury Green, part of the Cabinet Office in central London, now has a small pond, home to tadpoles, newts and dragonflies. It boasts bird and bat boxes, and wild flowers to attract a range of insects.

Rural escape

An even less promising site a few kilometres away in a traffic-choked part of north London is Holloway prison, a grim fortress opened in 1852.

Irredeemably urban, the prison does however have gardens and enclosed courtyards, which are now designed to encourage insects and birds.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says, perhaps a little hopefully: "Staff have recently identified further areas external to the prison that have potential for encouraging more wildlife.

Harebells and other wild flowers are returning

"This includes mammals such as hedgehogs, urban foxes, field mice and voles."

It says encouraging prisoners to work on their physical environment "can lead to positive changes in social attitudes".

Another prison, Wymott, set in rural Lancashire, has a small alder woodland nearby of a sort which is becoming locally rare. The prison farm staff have been coppicing the wood to encourage new growth and to help wild species.

They are also using sheep to graze the pasture next to the wood to help natural meadow grasses, and are seeing an increase in bird activity.

War wound

Bird population monitoring in one of the Royal parks, at Richmond in Surrey, has found a 28% rise in four years in numbers of farmland indicator species, and a 21% rise in woodland birds.

Kestrel: At home in the park

Richmond park is a significant site for the double-line moth, a nationally important species found nowhere else in eastern England.

In Regent's Park and Greenwich, spider surveys have found a number of scarce species.

Underground tunnels at an abandoned food depot in north Wales should attract bats, despite the site's previous history as Britain's main mustard gas factory during the second world war.

And new life will come from the ashes at several burial sites for farm animals destroyed in the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak of 2001, which are being landscaped and planted to attract wild species.