High over the Essex coast, an ancient battle of life and death is playing out: a peregrine falcon scans the ground at Old Hall Marshes nature reserve where lapwings guard their nests. A “deceit” (the collective noun for lapwings), bolts into the air to chase away the bird of prey. The furious group of expecting parents nip at the falcon’s feathers until it loses interest.
“This is probably the wildest part of Essex,” says Kieren Alexander, the RSPB site manager, scanning the wetlands with his binoculars for more skirmishes after the lapwings settle.
This week, the UK government announced that England’s east wetlands were being put forward as a potential Unesco world heritage site, recognising a key section of the East Atlantic Flyway that links bird migration routes from the Arctic Circle to southern Africa via western Europe.
If approved, the salt marshes and mudflats on the Essex coast, the Wash, parts of the Thames, and the Humber estuary would be acknowledged on the Unesco list as sites of international importance, alongside the Galápagos Islands and Kilimanjaro. More than 155 birds species rely on the 170,000 hectares of the east coast wetland network – around twice the size of New York City – to breed, overwinter and rest while migrating. They include species such as pink-footed geese, grey plovers and dunlins.
“The east coast wetlands are really important,” says Alexander, explaining how birds such as the bar-tailed godwit, curlews and knots use the network of sites. “They host about 1 million birds over the winter, with about 200,000 migrating along them in the spring, and 700,000 in the autumn.
“These wetlands are like a service station on a long journey. You stop off, you feed away and move on to your next destination. From here in Essex to the Wash, there are interconnections that have a global importance.”
The application was put forward by the RSPB, National Trust and Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust with the backing of local councils and the crown estate, and is one of seven potential Unesco sites submitted by the government after judging by an independent expert panel. A “tentative list” is published every 10 years or so, and this decade’s list includes York city centre, Birkenhead park and an iron-age settlement in Shetland.
The habitat network on the East Atlantic Flyway covers the Blakeney nature reserve in Norfolk and RSPB Minsmere in Suffolk – both areas that featured in the BBC’s Wild Isles series. Also included is Wallasea Island in Essex, which was partly restored using soil from Crossrail tunnels.
Banc d’Arguin in Mauritania, west Africa, and the Wadden Sea in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are other sections of the avian migration route that have Unesco status.
“If we really want to preserve these migratory species, we need to connect the dots and make sure that stopover places are truly protected,” says Patricia Zurita, the CEO of BirdLife International. “Just protecting the nesting areas in the north or the wintering areas in the south is not enough. You need the pitstops.”
She adds: “It’s not only for birds. Think about fish and other migratory species in Africa or Asia – they need corridors to be able to move, rest and refuel. Migration is an incredibly important part of our ecosystems. If we don’t protect these places, such as the sites in Essex, we’re not going to have the amazing species that we depend on.”
The RSPB says it hopes the bid will start a conversation about the future of the east England coastline, which is vulnerable to rising sea levels. Many of the wetland ecosystems in the network will be affected by rising waters. The Unesco bid offers a chance, it says, to discuss climate-adaptation projects that are potential win-wins for nature and people, protecting property and farmland from flooding while also creating habitat for birds, nursery grounds for fish, and sequestering carbon.
Only two of the UK’s 33 existing Unesco heritage sites are nature areas: the Jurassic coast in England and the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. The Flow Country, a large area of peatland across Caithness and Sutherland in the north of Scotland, has already been put forward to Unesco and is another key biodiversity site.
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