4 minute read

Or, you can listen to the full conversation on The Wild Cornwall Podcast.

What's your job with Cornwall Wildlife Trust?

I’m the Penhale Dunes Ranger: my sole responsibility is to look after this one site. The whole Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and Special Area of Conservation is 620 hectares.

Find out more about Penhale Dunes.

What makes the dunes such a special place?

One of the main things is the size: the sheer scale of uninterrupted, high quality sand dune habitat. You've got flower rich areas, full of things like bird’s-foot-trefoil, wild thyme, and kidney vetch. This is the kind of habitat that the silver-studded blue butterfly likes.

There are also dune slacks – seasonally wet areas – which have really specialist plants in them, things like shore dock.

You also get plenty of reptiles: slow worms, grass snakes, common lizards, and adders.

So why have we got wild ponies here? What benefits do they bring?

We have 24 ponies here: a mixture of Dartmoor, Shetland and Exmoor ponies. Basically, their job is to slow succession, which is the process by which the vegetation moves towards ‘woody-scrubby’. If you let the grass carry on growing, it gets thicker and ranker – bramble comes in, blackthorn comes in – and the dunes start heading towards a blanket of woodland. The ponies come in, and they graze these areas. They keep the niches open for flowering plants to make use of and they slow the spread of woody species, adding balance to the system.

On this site, we've been really lucky because we've had rabbits here for hundreds of years. And the one thing that's kept the dune in relatively good condition is rabbits grazing short turf areas. They don't favour flowers particularly, so we have a really nice flower rich turf – which the butterflies and insects love – and what the ponies do is hopefully expand the areas and niches that the rabbits can make use of. That combined grazing effect keeps the habitat in good condition for the widest variety of wildlife possible

Do you have other grazers?

Yes, so we've got Nancarrow Farm’s Organic North Devon cattle grazing here. Organic is really useful because that means the dung is ‘living’, which means that worms, insects, and bugs can make use of it. The cattle graze in a different way to the ponies. Ponies nibble the grass down nice and short. Cattle are a bit more ragged in their approach: they use the tongue a bit to rip the grass. They create a more varied sward height – a varied height of grass across the site – meaning that species that favour different heights of grass have still got a niche. Having a combination – rabbits, ponies, cattle, and we also get deer coming through, too – means they all do something a little bit different, with the main aim of keeping the habitat as diverse as possible, slowing down any the woody growth.

Does it take a fair bit of management?

The ponies come on in autumn and they graze through the winter. We check them periodically for welfare reasons. So the main thing is to keep an eye on them to make sure there are no issues. And we’ll obviously move them all between compartments. The Exmoor ponies stay on the dune throughout the year, but when the Shetlands and Dartmoors are done here for the winter, they go to a colleague who works on our mid-Cornwall reserves, and then they do the rounds of our sites… So, one of one main attributes of the Shetlands and Dartmoors is that they will go in the back of a trailer! They need to be wild enough not to approach people, but tame enough for us to be able to get a collar on them so that we can trim them.

Back in the past we'd have had wild horses in Britain? Are the ponies fulfilling the kind of role that wild horses would have had on our landscape?

Yes, they're fulfilling a general large herbivore role. We've domesticated everything or hunted it. The only large herbivore we've got left roaming are deer. So the ponies are mimicking what would have been here before, to try to add a bit of balance back to the environment.

Rewilding Helman Tor Appeal