Species classes: Birds

Sand dunes are places of constant change and movement. Wander through them on warm summer days for orchids, bees and other wildlife, or experience the forces of nature behind their creation – the raw power of a winter storm.

• Coast
• Habitats
• Marine

Skip the town beach and find an untamed shore to explore. Wild sand and shingle beaches are great places to see the variety of natural habitats and the amazing force of the elements that help shape them.

• Beach
• Coast
• Habitats

Water-logged and thick with reeds and robust tall-herbs or tussocky sedges, fens are evocative reminders of the extensive wet wildlands that once covered far more of the lowlands than they do today.

• Habitats
• Wetlands

Enormous flocks of geese, ducks and swans swirl down from wide skies to drop onto the flat, open expanses of flooded grazing marshes in winter. In spring, lapwing tumble overhead and the soft, damp ground speckled with cuckooflowers provides excellent habitat for waders probing for prey in the damp soil. By summer, when the ground is drier, some marshes are cut for hay or silage, but the ditches remain wet and come alive with dragonflies and other insects.

• Coast
• Grazing
• Habitats

Typical of softly rolling pastoral landscapes, the short, aromatic turf of lowland calcareous grassland is flower-rich and humming with insects in the summer. Its long use by humans lends it an ancient feel and it is often seen amongst prehistoric burial mounds, hill forts and old trackways.

• Chalk Grassland
• Grasslands
• Habitats

Sprinkled with diminutive, short-living flowers in spring and parched dry by July, this is a habitat of heathlands, coastal grasslands and ancient parkland.

• Grasslands
• Habitats

This distinctive type of damp pasture is generally found on commons, as a component of lowland fen, or in undeveloped corners of otherwise intensively farmed landscapes.

• Habitats

Heathlands form some of the wildest landscapes in the lowlands, where agriculture and development jostle for space, containing and limiting natural processes. Once considered as waste land of little value, lowland heathland is now appreciated and protected for its unique wildlife and austere beauty.

• Habitats
• Heathland

These wild, open landscapes stretch over large areas and are most often found in uplands. Although slow to awaken in spring, by late summer heathland can be an eye-catching purple haze of heather.

Cool, crystal-clear waters flow over gravelly beds, streaming through white-flowered water-crowfoot and watercress in serene lowland landscapes.