There’s a familiar quip, attributed to Mark Twain, that golf is a good walk spoiled. But leaving the pros and cons of the sport to one side, the question which concerns us here is what is its worth to wildlife? Or to put it another way, can the greens, fairways and bunkers of golf course also be a welcoming home to nature? 

Certainly, there is evidence that poorly planned and/or intensively managed golf courses can be very bad for wildlife. The construction of some has led directly to the destruction or the fragmentation of important existing wild habitats. In the past heathlands, downland and meadows have all been colonised by golf, pushing wildlife to their margins, or displacing it altogether.  

Then there are the operational costs of managing all that manicured grass. These include high water use, along with the liberal deployment of pesticides and herbicides. Little of this suggests ‘nature-friendly’.     

But, as with any type of land use, when managed with wildlife in mind, there are opportunities. With surprisingly few changes in how they are cared for, golf’s big green spaces can become a force for good. 

For club and country 

In recent years there’s been a growing recognition of the potential for golf courses to support wildlife or even play a part in its resurgence. Among the pioneers are Pyecombe Golf Club in the South Downs National Park. The adoption of more wildlife-friendly mowing regimes at the downland course sparked a comeback in local insect populations. Today the club can count 34 kinds of butterfly, including real rarities such as the adonis blue and grizzled skipper, living around its 18 holes. Golfers now play a course which contains more than 20 hectares of grassland which supports chalk downland wildflowers including round-headed rampion, horseshoe vetch and wild marjoram.  

Other golf clubs have teamed up with conservation partners to target the protection of specific plants and animals which are struggling to find a foothold in the wider countryside. At Cirencester Golf Club management has been tailored to encourage the recovery of the rare Duke of Burgundy butterfly. Alongside its immaculately kept greens the course now contains rougher areas of limestone grassland – the butterfly’s preferred habitat. In these the club has planted hundreds of cowslips – the foodplant of the Duke of Burgundy’s caterpillars – and has since seen the butterfly’s numbers take off.  

These aren’t isolated examples. More than 100 golf courses in England are now designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest due to the wildlife and wild features they contain. More than half of these are so important for nature, they are classified as European protected sites.  

Across the wider golfing landscape, the opportunities for nature are huge. England has 1,735 golf clubs. Get the management right on more of these and the benefits will be major. The gap between golf course features and wildlife habitats is not insurmountable. With the right management a water hazard becomes a wetland full of amphibians, and rough beside a fairway becomes rough grassland complete with wildflowers.   

The nature of golf 

At Devon Wildlife Trust we have firsthand experience of how a golf course can be a remarkable haven for nature. Back in the 1960s, we were bequeathed the Inner Warren, a piece of land close to the town of Dawlish in south Devon. Its tenant then and still today is the Dawlish Warren Golf Club. The person leaving us this generous gift in their Will was passionate about both golf and wildlife, so the land and the Club came hand in hand.  

The Inner Warren forms part of Dawlish Warren National Nature Reserve - a stunning sand spit which sits as a natural breakwater between the sea and the Exe Estuary. Known locally as ‘The Warren’, it’s a dynamic place, where wind and tide dramatically and repeatedly shape and reshape the land. It’s comprised of mobile and fixed dunes, dune ‘slacks’ (depressions between dune ridges which hold fresh water), patches of heathland, ponds, reed beds, salt marshes and mudflats – all within its 153 hectares. 

Much of the Warren is owned and managed by Teignbridge District Council and is open to the public. Its mix of dunes, marram grass and coarse sand beaches divided by wooden groynes are well worth exploring. A nearby train station, car parks and cafes make it a very popular destination.  

By contrast access to the Inner Warren’s golf course, which occupies around a third of The Warren’s total area, remains limited except to its players and the team of groundkeepers who manage its greens and fairways.     

This limited disturbance from people and dogs makes the Inner Warren hugely important for wildlife. At low tide the mudflats exposed at the golf course’s edge become a crucial feeding and roosting site for hundreds of birds, especially during autumn and winter months. Large flocks of wading birds and wildfowl, rely on this place, many of them using it as a life-sustaining stopover where they can rest and refuel on long distance migrations.  

Around 180 different bird species are recorded each year, including black-tailed godwits, brent geese, ringed plovers, dunlin, grey plovers, Slavonian grebes, red-breasted mergansers, wigeon and teal. As the tide returns to cover the mud, some of these birds move up onto the course, seeking shelter and to graze or probe its turf. This is a pace where it’s not unusual to see golfers sharing fairways with oyster catchers and geese. 

But it’s not just birds who find home on The Warren. More than 600 plant species have been discovered living across the whole of it sand spit. Among these is one little mauve star – the tiny sand crocus, which is found in the short grass around a few of the course’s 18 greens. The crocus is a real rarity; found only at one other site on mainland Britain.

Add to these an estimated 2,000 different insect species, including day-flying Jersey tiger moths, solitary wasps and rare ruddy darter dragonflies, plus being a key home to reptiles and amphibians including one of the UK’s scarcest reptiles, the sand lizard (released there in the 1990s by the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust), and it’s no surprise to find that that Dawlish Warren is internationally recognised for its importance to wildlife. No wonder it holds so many conservation designations and protections, being not only a Site of Special Scientific Interest, but also a Special Area of Conservation and a National Nature Reserve.  

Dawlish Warren Golf Club takes seriously its responsibilities to this bountiful nature.  It is one of the few clubs in the country to employ an ecologist, who with the help of Devon Wildlife Trust staff, advise on how course management can best suit wildlife, as well as golfers.  

The results of this commitment are tangible. The Club’s chemical use in the maintenance of its fairways and greens is amongst the lowest nationally. Areas of rough, longer grass have been increased, while sensitive parts of the course have been roped off, placing them out of bounds to the trampling of golf shoes and golf trolleys. Elsewhere old bunkers have been left to go wild. 

No wonder that Dawlish Warren Golf Club has been a finalist in the Golf Environment Awards in both 2022 and 2023, as well being a finalist in the national Conservation Green Team of the Year Award, 2022.  

In 2025 the Club is set to embark on its most ambitious project yet. For well over a century, the Club has adapted to natural shifts in the shape of the sand spit on which The Warren sits. But, to date, the layout of its course has remained largely unaltered. Now this is set to change as it sets out to enlarge existing areas of brackish wetlands by 50%. The expansion of these pools of salty water, fringed with reeds, will be a boon to wildlife, as well as providing an extra challenge for golfers. 

The course’s sixth hole will also be transformed, with its green completely relocated in a move to make more space for new sand dunes to form behind an existing sea defence. For wildlife this will create wonderful new habitat which sand lizards and burrowing wasps will colonise. But there is a wider motive: the new dunes should also reinforce The Warren’s role as a breakwater shielding the wider Exe Estuary from the impacts of rising sea levels and extreme storm events.   

I fear that I am unlikely to ever become a golfer, but I am a fan of golf courses which invest in nature. If you do play the sport and are also a nature enthusiast do talk to the club where you play about its work for wildlife. The Golf Environment Awards are a great place to start to inspire.