Antisocial behaviour on nature reserves - how you can help

By Dan Ross

Director of Land Management

As the country begins to look forward to a time when we emerge from lockdown, we would like to draw your attention to ongoing issues we are aware of affecting some our nature reserves. We are responding to a number of reports of antisocial behaviour across our nature reserves, ranging from use of trail bikes, unauthorised fires, theft of equipment such as gates or machinery, and occasional incidents of sheep worrying by dogs.

We welcome reports relating to anything you have seen whilst visiting our nature reserves, and you can contact us here. We will do our best to investigate ourselves with our Reserves teams. However we do rely on local police to carry out investigation and enforcement where a crime has been committed, and as such it is really important that the public report rural crime on our nature reserves directly to Sussex Police. The police call handlers will log and assign crime reference numbers and will analyse any known crime clusters, for example of rural thefts, to see if there are localised patterns. Please report any incidents to the police as soon as possible to enable a higher chance of catching those responsible. To this end, we would like to encourage the public to report any such crimes directly to Sussex Police using the telephone number 101, or via the Sussex Police online reporting system.

We want you to enjoy your visit to a Sussex Wildlife Trust nature reserve and help to keep these sites special places.