Pine martens in the Shropshire Hills
The Shropshire Hills are a great place in which to go exploring for wildlife – and even more so when you consider that the area has now been confirmed to be home to pine martens. Confirmation that the elusive pine marten was alive and well and living in the Shropshire Hills debunked the long-held belief that this mostly nocturnal predator was extinct in England.
An amateur naturalist captured the first pictures of the animal living in England, on night vision cameras.
Additional motion footage was captured subsequently by Shropshire Wildlife Trust around the Trust’s nature reserve at Clunton Coppice, in the Clun Valley.
The Trust is working with local partners, including the White Horse Inn, at Clun, to organise night-time nature walks in the Clunton Coppice and Lurkenhope (near Knighton) reserves.
The chances of actually seeing a pine marten may be fairly slim, but you may well catch sight of badgers, or roe or muntjac deer, or the rare local variety of fallow deer, which boasts a more shaggy coat than its cousins elsewhere.
These reserves are also two top locations for listening to the dawn chorus in April and May, and Clunton in particular is one of the best places to listen out for wood warblers when they begin to arrive back in the UK in the Spring.
