I'm Nick Acheson and I'm a wildlife ambassador for Norfolk Wildlife Trust,
and we're in the Brecks, which is the south west of Norfolk and really one of the most exciting and wonderful landscapes for wildlife in Norfolk.
Norfolk's famous for the Broads and for the Norfolk coast, but the Brecks is really where the special stuff lives,
and that's down to a long history of natural factors and then also human land use.
The result of which you have very poor soils,
which are very well drained, which don't hold water and don't hold nutrients,
but very important for wildlife.
East Wretham is the oldest of Norfolk Wildlife Trust's reserves in the Brecks landscape
and is very precious to us, and it's a combination of three major habitats. Brecks, grassland and conifer plantations, which are an 18th century feature of the landscape and also some unique wetlands, which are known as the meres.
And these are remarkable lakes which come and go according to their own cycles, and you can never predict when they'll have water in them and when they'll be dry.
But really, the the most priceless habitat is the Brecks grassland,
and that's come about through the felling of the wild wood which grew here prior to human colonization.
But is the result of these very poor, well drained soils.
And for centuries and centuries, people really couldn't farm here.
They couldn't grow arable crops except for one year,
so they would, by growing rye for example, or barley, they would exhaust the soil
and then shift on to somewhere else, leaving behind broken up ground.
And that's where the word breck comes from. It means broken ground.
As a result of that, many species of ants, of bees, of wasps, of wildflowers that live in these disturbed grounds
have come to live in the Brecks and are not found anywhere else in the UK.
And here it is East Wretham the bunnies, the rabbits, help us to preserve that landscape
because they are driving that dynamism, disturbing the sand, creating the conditions that these organisms need.
Wayland Wood is an ancient wood and the reason they're so special is
because a wood is the cumulative product of hundreds of years of interaction
between the plants that grow there, but also the soils, and bacteria, and fungi, and many animals that live in the woods,
and the longer time they've had living together, the stronger the links between them
and the more species can be fitted into the ecosystem.
So an ancient wood is super important.
Wayland is the only place, for example, where the very rare yellow Gagae, or yellow star-of-Bethlehem, grows
anywhere in Norfolk, but it's also home to a host of wonderful other plants.
As you walk through the woods, you'll see a range of different stages of vegetation, and that's because we coppice the wood.
Copice was the practice of cutting down Hazel's and other trees to make them grow up as a stakes.
And this was done for centuries and centuries by local people who needed the stakes,
and as a result of that we do it today in order to preserve the best habitat
for the butterflies and flowers that live in the wood, and that's what you can see here.
Thompson Common is the single most important reserve in Britain for pingos.
Now pingos are a very special Ice Age ponds.
At the retreat of the Devensian glaciation, we had periods of warmer summers, relatively but very brutally cold winters.
And during those bitterly cold winters, the springs which naturally well up from the chalk, the bedrock, they would freeze
and ice being larger than water, the soil would be pushed up by the ice.
And then in the springtime, as temperatures began to rise, the soil would slip off the side.
And what you ended up with then was a spring fed pool with a rampart around the edge.
And these pingos have existed since the end of the Ice Age,
and they are a store, not just of very rare species, 58 Red Data Species are associated with Thompson Common's pingos,
but they're also a store of landscape history because the pollen that lies in the bottom of them
tells us the history of the landscape for the last 12,000 years.
Now, these pinogs have had changing fortunes over time
because the common has been managed in different ways through the centuries.
And what we try to do at Norfolk Wildlife Trust is maintain a variety of different stages of succession.
So some pingos are open to the sunlight and some are deeply shaded.
And very rare organisms, like the pond mud snail, they need to be in the shade,
but the pool frogs for example, they need to be in the sunshine, and the pool frogs are very special to us.
They became extinct as a British species in the 1990s.
And since the middle of the 2000s, in collaboration with Natural England, with Amphibian And Reptile Conservation,
we've been bringing them back to the Brecks landscape and we're now introducing them to Thompson Common, where they're thriving.
And they have this wonderful rolling, clattering song, really charismatic sound that we hope will come to be heard
right through pingos and Thompson Common.
In the course of the late 20th century, we've come to realize that having nature reserves isn't enough,
and in order for wildlife to face the many challenges of the modern world, we need connected landscapes.
We need nature reserves connected across farmland, across amenity areas, across places where people live.
And so we're in the process of expanding our nature reserves where possible and buffering them from surrounding farmland.
And we've had the enormous privilege of purchasing land next to Norfolk Wildlife Trust Thompson Common
which we will be reverting to Brecks grassland and also hoping to restore pingos that have been lost.
And for that, we're enormously grateful for the generosity of the people of Norfolk
and many other donors who've given money to us, enabling us to make this purchase.
More than ever before in our history as humans,
we need nature itself, not just to admire and to love, but if we're going to get through our future, we need nature around us.
We need healthy, vibrant ecosystems.
Wild space can be the tiny plant of procumbent pearlwort growing in a pavement crack outside your flat.
But that is still meaningful. It's still a wildlife with whom you're sharing the planet,
and it's still a reason to carry on fighting and build a relationship with nature.