UK Wildlife Trust links

Handykam wrote for an audience that overlapped heavily with the county wildlife trusts, and it kept a directory of all of them on the site. That directory was one of the most-used pages here. It is preserved in purpose but not in form, for a reason worth stating plainly: it was last maintained around 2018, and a substantial number of the individual addresses it listed no longer resolve. Trusts have merged, rebranded and moved to new domains since. Shipping a page of forty-six unverified links would be worse than useless.

So this page does the same job a different way: it explains what the network is and sends you to the live, maintained finder.

Find your local trust

The Wildlife Trusts maintain a current directory of every trust in the UK, including the Isle of Man, Alderney and the Isles of Scilly:

The Wildlife Trusts — find your local Trust

And for the county this company came from: Cornwall Wildlife Trust.

What the network actually is

This surprises people. The Wildlife Trusts are not a single national charity with branches. They are a federation of independent charities — around forty-six of them — each rooted in its own county or region, each with its own trustees, membership, staff and priorities, and each owning and managing its own land. The national body coordinates, campaigns and represents the movement, but a Wildlife Trust is a local organisation in a real sense, and joining one supports work in the place you live.

Between them the Trusts manage thousands of nature reserves across the UK. You can find a reserve near you on the national site, and most Trusts run events, surveys and volunteering that go well beyond simply owning land.

Why they mattered to a wildlife camera company

Reserves are one of the settings this kind of equipment was built for: cameras out on the land, public displays in visitor centres, and monitoring of species where a person present would cause disturbance. Conservation trusts are also where the ecology knowledge sits, and they were the people to point a reader towards when a question about a camera was really an ecology question rather than an electronics one — whether a box was in a sensible place, whether an owl box could be inspected yet, what was likely to move into a hedgehog box. A camera company can tell you about lenses; it should be telling you to ask a trust about the animal.

Other national organisations worth knowing

• RSPB — birds and their habitats, and the most accessible source of practical garden advice.
• British Trust for Ornithology — the science. Its Nest Record Scheme and Garden BirdWatch are how amateur observation becomes long-run data, and BirdFacts is the reference for individual species.
• The Barn Owl Trust — the authority on barn owls, their boxes and their conservation.
• Bat Conservation Trust — all UK bats are protected, and the law around them is stricter than most people realise before they put up a bat box or point a camera at a roost.
• People's Trust for Endangered Species — including hazel dormice, another fully protected species where box work requires a licence.
• Hedgehog Street — the practical reference for hedgehog boxes, feeding and garden access.
• The Woodland Trust — woodland habitats and good species identification pages.
• Natural England — the statutory body, and the source for wildlife licensing.

A note on the original directory

The old page listed all forty-six trusts alphabetically with their web addresses, and invited readers to report anything missing or broken. That invitation is the right instinct and the reason this page has been rebuilt rather than reproduced — a link directory is only as good as its last maintenance, and this one lost its maintainer. The national finder above will not go stale in the same way.

Related pages: World wildlife webcams · Conservation · Science and research