Friday 18 April 2008

16 Dartmoor Heritage Ponies have travelled 300 miles across Britain to begin a new life on a Norfolk nature reserve. The ponies join Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s existing Dartmoor herd of 22 ponies providing essential conservation grazing.

The indigenous Dartmoor pony is now officially recognised as an endangered species. These new arrivals to Norfolk will graze a mosaic of heather heath, wet grassland and mire on NWT Roydon Common and NWT Grimston Warren, a former conifer plantation that NWT is currently restoring to heathland.

The ponies were sourced from Dartmoor Pony Heritage Trust (DPHT), with funds from SITA Trust, which makes awards through the Landfill Communities Fund, after the success of the ponies purchased in 2005. Despite their long journey, the ponies showed no signs of stress or fatigue - in fact true to type they quickly had their heads straight down to eat!

NWT staff received training from DPHT and Positive Horsemanship on handling techniques for the semi-feral Dartmoor ponies. It is important to get the right balance between the ponies’ wildness and manageability because if they become too tame, they can become overly-friendly to the public on our nature reserves rather than carry out important conservation grazing.

The main goal of DPHT is to preserve the traditional type of Dartmoor pony, now known as the Dartmoor Heritage pony. In 2007, DPHT embarked on a major campaign to promote the Dartmoor Pony for conservation grazing. "We set out to add value to the ponies," said Charity Manager, Dru Butterfield. "Finding new markets for the ponies has been an important area of our work and I am delighted with the interest we have created in Heritage stock."

NWT Grazing Officer Mel Slote said: “We have 300 hectares of wet and dry heath and valley mire at Roydon and Grimston that will benefit enormously from the structural diversity that the pony grazing will bring. The ponies that we brought back from Dartmoor with the help of DPHT in 2005 have been such a success on the nature reserve that it was a natural conclusion to go back and get more to graze the newly recreated heath at Grimston. Having the ponies resident on site helps to secure the grazing management for the habitat and a range of heath and mire species. Having seen the grazing that has been taking place firsthand in Dartmoor, we are confident that NWT’s new employees will do a fantastic job on the nature reserve!”