Remember a Charity Week

Nick Acheson, NWT Volunteer

At Norfolk Wildlife Trust we love life. We love wildlife and we love human life. Our nature reserves protect thousands of species of life – most of the terrestrial and freshwater species found in Norfolk – from the merest bacteria to extravagantly beautiful great crested grebes quivering their bronze-and-black crests in display in the Broads. In addition, we work with human life, meeting thousands of people each year – landowners, families, teachers and children – to enrich their lives, inspire them to love nature, and encourage them to protect wildlife in the future.

NWT Lower Wood, Ashwellthorpe, photo by Richard Osbourne

 

Do you too love life in Norfolk? Do you smile at the peacock and red admiral butterflies sunning themselves in your garden? Do you make an annual pilgrimage to watch hares boxing in a spring field? Does your heart skip a beat as you come across a barn owl floating ghostly over a misty water-meadow? Do tears come to your eyes as you hear a nightingale pouring his soul into a warm May evening on a North Norfolk heath?

If, like us, you love wildlife in Norfolk, you have the opportunity to celebrate it, and support us in our work to protect it and enhance our human relationship with it, by leaving us a legacy in your will. Remember a Charity in Your Will Week, which runs from 9 to 15 September 2013, is an annual event aimed at encouraging people to leave legacies to charities in their wills, once their loved ones have been provided for.

For Norfolk Wildlife Trust, as for charities all over the UK, legacies are vital. With your legacies Norfolk Wildlife Trust buys new nature reserve and sets in place the plans needed to protect them and enhance them for wildlife and for future generations of Norfolk people. With your legacies Norfolk Wildlife Trust takes school children to its nature reserves, allowing them to build a relationship with wildlife, for the rest of their lives and their own children’s lives. It repairs hides and builds boardwalks, the better to allow access to reserves; it puts up boxes for bats, makes ponds for natterjacks, and erects platforms in the hope that ospreys will return to Norfolk to breed. A legacy to Norfolk Wildlife Trust is a promise to the future of Norfolk’s wildlife and of Norfolk’s human life.

So this September, as summer’s end is foretold by the wind gossiping in the reeds at Cley, by the thousand thousand birch seeds spinning over the heath at Buxton, and by the gathering of the marsh harriers at their winter roost at Stubb Mill, pause for a moment to look and to breathe. As you look, as you breathe, reflect on the beauty of the wildlife which shares our Norfolk with us and, if so moved, please consider leaving a legacy in your will which will help Norfolk Wildlife Trust to protect it.

For our part, we promise to use your legacies to look after Norfolk’s wild habitats, now and in the future – through spring’s birth and autumn’s end, and through the annual comings and goings of the birds – so that they may be enjoyed forever by Norfolk’s wildlife and by Norfolk’s people.

Please read more about legacies and Norfolk Wildlife Trust