THE Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) was the brainchild of Sir Peter Scott, a Naval officer, Olympic sailor, champion glider pilot and skater, wildfowler and artist.

Born in 1909, he was the son of Antarctic explorer Capt Robert Falcon Scott whose dying wish was that he wanted his son to be ‘interested in natural history’.

Dramatist J.M. Barrie was one of the boy’s godfathers; he was named after the hero of Barrie’s play Peter Pan.

Peter’s early interests included natural history and collecting but, while his family were opposed to blood sports, he spent his 17th birthday stalking and shooting deer, and became an ‘uninhibited hunter’.

He began wildfowling on the Washes while at Cambridge University, combining shooting with bird watching, and with painting the birds he met on out the marshes.

Eventually his doubts about the suffering caused by shooting prompted him to sell his guns and focus on learning about and caring for the wildfowl of the marshes: that culminated in the formation of what was to become the WWT.

Peter went on to be a driving force in world conservation; Sir David Attenborough famously called him “the patron saint of conservation”.

He co-designed the Red Lists which categorise species in terms of threat; he co-founded the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands - the first international protection for a habitat - and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

As well as serving as the WWF’s first chairman, Sir Peter also designed the famous WWF panda logo.

In 1973 Sir Peter was knighted for his services to conservation, the first person to be so honoured. He died in 1989.

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WWT 70th anniversary – fact file

• As part of its programme to reintroduce the common crane to Britain, WWT staff had to dress as adult birds to stop the chicks identifying with humans. This involved dressing in grey smocks and using litter pickers shaped like adult crane heads to feed the chicks. They also taught the chicks to forage, swim and run away from dogs, and even ran up and down flapping their arms to teach the chicks to fly.

• The first rings attached to birds’ legs to help identify individuals were made of metal and difficult to read: catching the birds was the only way to access the ringing number. That led to the invention of the bright plastic rings in use today which have enabled identification at a distance . . . and without the trauma of having to catch the bird.

• WWT now operates 10 Wetland Centres across the UK. Slimbridge was the pioneer in 1946: it’s since been joined by Caerlaverock, on the north Solway coast of Scotland (1971), Martin Mere and Washington (both 1975), Arundel (1976), Castle Espie in Northern Ireland (1990), Llanelli in South Wales (1991), the London Wetland Centre (2000), Welney (2006), and Steart Marshes in Somerset last year.

• One early feather in WWT’s cap was the rescue from extinction of the rarest goose in the world, the Hawaiian wild goose or nene. Only 32 individuals remained when Sir Peter Scott brought a pair back to Slimbridge in 1950. The nenes bred and thrived in captivity, enabling their offspring to be reintroduced to the wild in 1962. The bird quickly became a public favourite and the species now numbers over 2,000 worldwide.

• There are no ends to which staff will not go to help birds. As part of the ongoing spoon-billed sandpiper project, WWT stood naked on the Russian tundra to attract mosquitos with which to feed the ‘spoony’ chicks. They collected the insects off their own bodies using hand-held car vacuum cleaners, and used hair dryers to keep the chicks warm.

• In the 1940s, WWT founder Peter Scott and fellow ex-servicemen tied old wartime rockets to nets which they fired over flocks of grazing geese to catch and ring them. The system of ‘rocket netting’ is still used to catch geese today.

• Through sketching Bewick’s swans, Peter Scott discovered that each one has a different yellow ‘design’ on its bill, and that can be used to identify individual birds. The ‘bill pattern’ method has been used to study individuals over years, and has proved that swans usually mate for life: only two ‘divorces’ have been recorded in 50 years of observations.

• The Svalbard barnacle goose is the subject of one of the most successful schemes to save an endangered species. Measures to reduce illegal shooting of the goose which overwinters at WWT Caerlaverock have resulted in the world population topping 40,000; numbers had fallen to less than 400 in 1946.

• In its 70 years to date, WWT has worked in over 70 countries with wetland projects ranging ranged from air temperature regulation in Sri Lanka, and sewage break-down in China, to carbon storage in soil around the world.