Pilot Pig, Lea Wood Nature Reserve

This overall project aims to enhance and restore natural habitats across a corridor of five public access sites, piloting a wilder grazing model that integrates native pigs with existing native cattle and ponies to diversify woodland, scrub and grassland habitats. The five sites are closely connected nature reserves starting at Gang Mine and Rose End Meadows, then down Cromford Hill to Slinter Woods and Dunsley Meadows and South along the Derwent River to Lea Woods. The sites have previously been heavily curated by humans, but recent evidence has shown the benefit of reintroducing native species to deliver that management through natural processes, creating dynamism that results in higher levels of biodiversity. Derbyshire Wildlife Trust have been carefully reintroducing a mixed herd of native cows and then ponies which have maintained the site’s high-quality habitat and contributed to rewilding and transitional habitats. Native pigs as a key grazing species are currently missing and this project is for a carefully monitored pilot project to integrate them with the existing herd and create a strategy for delivering wilder grazing across the sites long-term.Wild pigs will deliver biodiversity uplift on the site, creating much needed resilience to climate change, pollution and other pressures around the quarry. Instinctively driven to root up the ground, pigs create tufts of grass by tearing clumps up from the root up and overturning it. This creates complex micro habitats for insect life, gives birds access to the soil and insects under the grass, and uncovers bare ground receptive of any new seeds the birds or other animals spread.

This project will build a fenced enclosure at Lea Wood nature reserve, with hazel sourced onsite and woven into a pig arc with bracken bedding. An existing volunteer group based at neighbouring Aquaduct Cottage will create the pig arc and support with the fencing, and will then move pigs onsite with water and supplementary feeding facilities. The volunteers will receive training on pig monitoring and management, and interpretation will be commissioned for a board on the fence next to the footpath, working with the volunteers to engage visitors to the site. Across the other three reserves, DWT will maintain pre-determined grazing densities of native cows and ponies, allowing a comparison with the pig pilot site.