A land fit for duck?
Looking at the worked-out gravel pits as we travel the motorways and the new ponds on many a farm, it’s easy to think that Britain is a fairly duck-friendly country. It is certainly the case that lots of new wetland habitat has been created over the past few decades. But, prior to that, a lot was lost and much of it on a grand scale.
Reclaiming the land
Exactly when the first person decided to improve the drainage of a piece of land to grow better crops is lost in the mists of time, but big-scale efforts go back much further than you might suppose. Victorian attempts at reclaiming land from the sea, particularly along the east coast, are well known. In places, you can see progressively bigger sea walls, one outside another, marking the progress of
