DAREDEVIL Dartmoor conservationist and aviator Sacha Dench has flown with swans and is now set to fly like an eagle in an amazing 6000-mile flight to Africa beneath the flimsy canopy of a motorised parachute, writes Jane Rush.

The Australian-born adventurer who calls Chagford home will flying by paramotor from Scotland to Ghana next year, aiming to draw attention to a once-endangered raptor — the osprey. The bird of prey was almost driven to extinction and in the UK their numbers are still recovering.

Sacha’s already taken to the skies to raise awareness of wildlife, flying above the Russian Tundra. While she was working for the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust three years ago, she undertook a 4000-mile flight from Russia to the UK with migrating Berwick swans to raise awareness of their dwindling numbers.

She’ll be making a film about during her breathtaking migration with the ospreys next year, showing a bird of prey’s eye-view from the clouds, as well as introducing some of the people she meets on stops along the way.

Not many people get to appreciate Dartmoor from the viewpoint of a soaring bird but thanks to her paramotor, Sacha has often flown over the tors and herds of wild ponies.

Her description is breathtaking. ‘Buzzards will fly with you on a day when there are good thermals. They will often join you on a country cruise which is beautiful,’ she says.

‘When it’s out of tourist season, early in the morning, it can feel really quite wild and you can see the old stone circles and the lines on the landscape. The changing seasons I find quite exciting, especially early winter when you are still getting big morning frosts or light snow and there’s lots of texture on the landscape. I particularly like flying first thing in the morning when the sun is coming up and you get frost shades across the landscape.’

If hanging off a piece of fabric in mid-air with a motor strapped to your back sounds hair-raising, so does camping alone, as Sacha did in the Tundra — with the possibility of bears creeping up on her.

‘I happen to be quite good at things which involve managing lots of different risks,’ says Sacha, who was the first person to cross the English Channel by paramotor and won the Britannia Award for her aviation feat in 2018.

Sacha, who is also a champion free-diver — swimming down to incredible ocean depths just by holding her breath — says adventures like hers begin by identifying your passions, deciding what you feel is important and playing to your own strengths.

‘Once you can combine those things you can pretty much do anything,’ she says. ‘That’s what I found with flying with birds. I found had a passion for conservation and for helping conservationists. Logically the important thing for me is not letting species go extinct and motivating enough people to help.’

Born in Australia, Sacha describes growing up there as a Crocodile Dundee style childhood that might alarm today’s ‘helicopter’ parents — but set her in good stead for paramotoring solo above the clouds.

She believes that today’s children are brought up to be aware of lots of dangers, but that we should encourage them to be bolder. She hopes to inspire a sense of adventure in a new generation of kids, saying ‘you can pretty much do anything’.

‘My parents encouraged me to snorkel, to explore the rock pools on my own, to go camping with my friends in the Australian bush,’ she says.

‘My mother’s attitude whenever I had a crazy idea was to say “Well, how can we make this happen?” And I suppose I absorbed that.

‘I was brought up to have confidence that I could cope. Anything that lit me up I would explore and see what I was good at because you are never going to know except by trial and error. I feel enthusiastic about telling kids to do that.’

With family links to Chagford and having visited the area since her teens, Sacha says she’s found her ‘forever home’ on Dartmoor and within a community where she feels a sense of belonging and connection.

‘It’s a lovely mix of people who are born and bred in Devon and from around the world, so there is a mixture of skills and interests,’ she says.

‘There are people who understand the land and country, and people who are TV producers. I am also a mix, having grown up in the Australian bush and also dealing now with international organisations and media, I feel at home in a place that has a similar mix.

‘You can walk out onto the moors and feel you are in the middle of the wilderness but in the middle of the village you can meet people from anywhere. I like that.’

Sacha will be hosting a dinner in Chagford to fundraise for her flight across Africa with the ospreys. She’ll be joined by video link on the night by naturalists Roy Dennis of the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation and UN raptor conservationist Nick Williams.

Roy Dennis was instrumental in the comeback of ospreys in the UK over the last 50 years, as part of the original team in Scotland protecting the theft of the endangered birds’ eggs.

Sacha is under no illusion about the challenge of the forthcoming trip flight to Ghana, but says she is ready to take it on. ‘A fear of new things – I don’t have that – and that is what holds back a lot of people.’

• Discover more about Sacha’s adventures at www.sachadench.com