Rabbits on the Sefton Coast: The Keystone Species the Dunes Cannot Afford to Lose

10 June 2026

What Rabbits Do for Sand Dunes

A healthy dune system is not static. Sand should be moving through the system, plants kept in check, bare patches opening and closing as conditions change. Rabbits are central to all of this.

Their grazing keeps vegetation short, maintaining a diverse open sward with room for rare plants, insects, and basking reptiles. Their burrowing keeps bare sand exposed and in motion, essential for dune dynamism and for pioneer species that cannot establish in dense vegetation. Their latrine areas create nitrogen-rich patches that support a further suite of plant communities. The overall effect is a mosaic of habitats far richer than a dune system without rabbits.

On the Sefton Coast, the species that depend most directly on rabbit-maintained habitat include the natterjack toad, sand lizard, and northern dune tiger beetle. The short open turf rabbits create is essential for natterjack breeding pools to warm quickly enough for tadpole development. Sand lizards require bare south-facing sand for thermoregulation and egg-laying. Without rabbits maintaining open conditions, these species lose the microhabitats they need.

The Collapse: Myxomatosis and What Followed

In the 1950s, myxomatosis was deliberately introduced to the UK to control rabbit populations. The impact on the Sefton Coast was severe. Populations collapsed by an estimated 99% in the worst-affected areas. The disease is still present in the population today.

Just as numbers were beginning to slowly recover, rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV1) arrived in the UK in the 1990s, followed by RHDV2 in 2010. Between the two viruses and ongoing myxomatosis, rabbit populations have never returned to historical levels anywhere on the Sefton Coast.

The ecological consequences are visible across the dune system. Without rabbit grazing, vegetation has grown rank and dense. Sea buckthorn, introduced to the Sefton Coast in the late nineteenth century and previously kept in check by heavy rabbit grazing, spread rapidly after the myxomatosis crash. Marram grass has dominated more of the open dune face. The bare sand patches, short-grazed turf, and dune slack margins that support the rarest species have all contracted.

The Legal Paradox

Despite their ecological importance, rabbits have no protected status in England. The Pests Act 1954 requires landowners to take steps to prevent rabbit damage. There is no legal requirement to maintain rabbit populations, no protection for wild rabbits, and no restriction on culling them outside the context of individual listed species protections.

This creates a genuine conservation difficulty. The same species classified as a pest in agricultural contexts is, on the dunes, ecologically essential. Where the management objective requires more rabbits, not fewer, the legal framework offers no support. Conservation on the Sefton Coast depends entirely on active, funded management programmes rather than any form of statutory protection for the species itself.

What the Dynamic Dunescapes Project Has Done

The Dynamic Dunescapes project, which ran from 2020 to 2026 across the Sefton Coast and other major English and Welsh dune systems, included rabbit population enhancement as a specific conservation objective. The Sefton Coast work covers over 4,500 hectares across Ainsdale Sand Dunes NNR, Birkdale Hills, and National Trust Formby.

The approach on the Sefton Coast has focused on creating better conditions for existing populations to expand rather than direct reintroduction. Turf stripping to create bare sand provides ideal burrowing habitat and rabbits will begin digging in freshly stripped areas within 24 hours. Livestock grazing is also being used on some sites: grazed sites consistently support better rabbit populations because the shorter sward is more palatable and the habitat diversity more attractive.

Natural England commissioned specific research in 2015 into rabbit reintroduction feasibility on the Sefton Coast, assessing the prospect of establishing new breeding populations at Winsdale and Birkdale Hills LNR. The ongoing monitoring from Dynamic Dunescapes is building the evidence base for future decisions.

What This Means for the Dune Ecosystem

The dune restoration work on the Sefton Coast is largely aimed at recreating the conditions rabbits once maintained naturally. Turf stripping, scrub clearance, mowing: all of it is substituting human management effort for the ecological work that sufficient rabbit populations would provide.

The long-term aspiration is a dune system with enough rabbit activity that it maintains its own dynamism without constant intervention. That is not the current situation. But the trajectory is moving in the right direction: more bare sand, more rabbit-suitable habitat, and populations that are not continuing to decline.

If you walk the Sefton Coast and see rabbits feeding or burrowing on the open dunes, they are doing some of the most important conservation work on this coastline. They are not background scenery. They are the original architects of the habitat.