The Wet Willow Wildlife project, funded by Defra’s Species Survival Fund, has been a fantastic project to work on, and time has flown by over the last two years, from March 2024 to February 2026.
Wet Willow Wildlife: End of project blog
Senior Project Officer, Fiona Sunners, sums up the achievements of the two-year Wet Willow Wildlife project – for both nature and people.
Willow tit at Pennington Flash © Adam Jones
What is the Wet Willow Wildlife Project?
The project worked across wet woodland sites in Bolton, the Salford & Wigan mosslands, Trafford and the Mersey Gateway – rich in life but often overlooked and undervalued due to their messy appearance.
These habitats support many species including the precious willow tit (Britain’s second fastest declining resident bird), with a huge variety of species, such as moths, helleborines, amphibians all creating thriving ecosystems. Wet woodlands are characterised by low growing trees and scrub; willow, hazel, hawthorn and bramble, in wet/damp areas.
However, if left alone those low scrubby trees will grow tall leaving the understory plants shaded out. The wet woodland then becomes a mature woodland, which in turn changes the wildlife and plants that can survive there. In a balanced ecosystem there would be patches of wet woodland developing around the more mature woodland, ensuring that its specialised wildlife would continue to have a home. However, in our increasingly developed and human-altered landscape this occurs less often, and so these characteristic wet woodlands are increasingly disconnected from each other and disappearing.
Hence the Wet Willow Wildlife project was born. We partnered with The Conservation Volunteers to create a series of volunteering opportunities across our region where people could get involved in helping to restore and link up precious areas of wet woodland.
How do you restore a wet woodland habitat?
One of amazing volunteers planting trees (c) Fiona Sunners
We restored areas of wet woodland by removing some of the canopy trees to allow light in and replanting with scrub species, as well as carrying out lattice coppicing to increase the density of the understory and removing overly dominant invasive species.
We installed features to slow the flow of water across sites which facilitates the rotting of timber, providing opportunities for willow tits which need standing deadwood for their nest holes. Restoration work has created habitat pockets and corridors throughout woodlands to improve connectivity, giving the wildlife more and better opportunities to move and thrive.
Wet Willow Wildlife project achievements:
🌳 51 hectares of wet woodland improved
🌳 632 hectares connected across the project area
🌳 9,462 trees planted
The importance of volunteers
Some of our Wet Willow Wildlife volunteers
Much of our work was undertaken by volunteers, who have contributed many hours of their time to improve this habitat and resulted in us being able to deliver all of the project targets. It has been great working with existing volunteers as well as new ones, all of whom enjoy the health & wellbeing benefits of being outdoors in nature, learning new skills and meeting new people whilst helping local wildlife.
Wet Willow Wildlife project achievements:
👩 538 volunteers
👩 6,689 volunteering hours
Citizen science
Site assessments helped us in the planning of the works but just as important were all the willow tit and other wildlife records, again gathered by our citizen science volunteers. Working on this project has made me realise how important volunteer input is across a project. Without the volunteers we simply wouldn't have been able to gather the amount of data we need in such a short timescale.
I especially enjoyed the opportunity to survey for willow tits, a tricky job that involves initially identifying their call. I wasn’t that confident when I heard my first call as the bird making it was flitting around above me and I couldn’t be sure it was a willow tit. However, further along the transect (the route of the survey) a second call came from an obliging individual who sat nicely in the branches above. Seeing this one clearly boosted my confidence that the first one was a willow tit - as they say practice makes perfect and - ‘tick’ - my first willow tits recorded!
Another highlight was seeing the lunar clearwing moth – surely that’s a wasp not a moth! The mimicry was amazing.
Wet Willow Wildlife project achievements:
🔍 182km2 surveyed for willow tits
🔍 1,934 willow tit data records submitted
🔍 34 positive willow tit records
🔍 188 moth species recorded
🔍 533 moth data records submitted
Engaging the local community with the Wet Willow Wildlife project
Bug hunting with a school group - Fiona Sunners
Habitat works and surveys were only one part of the Wet Willow Wildlife project – the other side has been the engagement with local people. With many of the sites having developed on former industrial sites located in urban areas, we had a large audience for engagement. We wanted to focus on people who, for whatever reason, had less involvement with nature and give them the chance to connect more with nature, and this project provided that opportunity.
Our team ran activities such as wildlife walks, nature art, or making bug houses with community groups from ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities and poor health and wellbeing. Held at local and accessible locations this helped to raise awareness of people’s nearby nature, the benefits it provides, and how even seemingly small actions can help the environment. We also provided learning opportunities for schools as well as local families, again using the project’s species as the inspiration for the learning, with craft activities, quizzes, nature walks, pond dipping and bioblitzes.
Wet Willow Wildlife project achievements:
👨👩👧👦 1,464 people attended 40 public events
👨👩👧👦 672 young people attended school engagement events
👨👩👧👦 499 people attended the community partnership programme
The impact of the Wet Willow Wildlife project
The skills and experience of the project team; Jessica, Phil, Alex, Ruth and Emma, along with partnering with The Conservation Volunteers helped us smash the initial project targets (although, of course, it hasn’t all been plain sailing and we have learnt several lessons along the way).
Working with different landowners on different sites across the area has resulted in improved networks of corridors and connectivity for wildlife and has also given us food for thought to develop further projects and collaborations in the future – so watch this space.
In summary, I hope that our poster species the willow tit (who we likened to Goldilocks for needing conditions “just right”), as well as the other wet woodland species, will really benefit from the work carried out, and that everybody involved continues to connect to and enjoy nature. It has been a great team effort to deliver and achieve some amazing outputs for wildlife and people.
