RECORD WILDFIRES HAVE DESTROYED NATURAL HABITATS This is just heartbreaking

HEATHLAND is home to some of our rarest birds and reptiles but this year's record number of wildfires have turned many areas into blackened wastelands.

- BY NADA FARHOUD

As I walk over Holt Heath, north of Wimborne in Dorset, the torched ground resembles a battlefield, rather than the haunt of nightjars, Dartford warblers, slow worms and sand lizards.

More than 100 firefighters from 17 brigades tackled the flames thought to have been started deliberately on August 9 and which spread across 177 acres. A few miles away, another important wildlife site went up in flames at Upton Heath, on the edge of Poole, in April.

Brian Bleese, chief executive of Dorset Wildlife Trust, recalled seeing cooked birds eggs in the smoking aftermath.

"It was heartbreaking to find burnt gorse bushes with charred nests in them with little cooked eggs inside them," he said.

"That is a time of year when you don't expect fires but the dry spell started back in March making the heathlands very flammable.

"It was absolutely devastating."

They were just two of nearly a thousand wildfires tackled by fire crews in England and Wales so far this year. The flames took hold during the country's driest spring in 70 years - and what the Met Office says is almost certainly the hottest summer on record.

Many blazes are easily started by people dropping cigarette ends or lighting fires in parched areas.

Wildlife trusts are calling for a ban on disposable barbecues.

Brian explained: "Heathland fires are very far from being natural. They're either started by neglect or increasingly by arson, which is tragic for people and for wildlife in the area."