The southwest’s wildlife doesn’t stop at the beach. Islands, islets and rocks all around our coast provide refuges for their own very special animals and plants. Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour is a little marooned relic of the Dorset Heathlands and is one of the last English refuges of the red squirrel. Stacks and rocks all along the south coast provide nesting ledges for guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and shags and our own island archipelago, The Isles of Scilly, is internationally important for its seabirds and unique plant life: tussocks of sea pink, violets and scurvy grass painting a picture in the spring. Lundy is England’s only Marine Nature Reserve and the island’s cliffs and coastal grasslands support seabirds and rare plants. Even tiny Steepholm, a Nature Reserve in the Bristol Channel, has 260 kinds of flowering plant as well as a colony of cormorants and unique races of snails and slow worms.
Some of the Best Examples:
