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“Sometimes the management work we do on our nature reserves looks more like destruction than conservation,” says Elliott Fairs, Wildlife Trust Reserves Officer. “But there’s always a good reason.”
Throughout
nature there are species with extremely complicated and somewhat fussy needs
that allow them to thrive. Then there are those that require bare ground: just
nice, simple, bare ground. It is the latter that the Wildlife Trust has been
helping recently to ensure these species have their place on our heaths. And
we’ve employed the help of a different type of plant – mechanical plant.
Bare ground provides some wildlife with an ideal opportunity for
colonisation. Seeds falling onto bare soil have a much better chance of
germinating than on grassy areas. The bare mud or sand soaks up much more of the
sun’s heat than surrounding vegetation, so provides excellent basking points for
insects
and reptiles. The high level of insect activity on localised areas of bare
ground provides perfect hunting for insect-eating birds, such as woodlarks.
Historically, bare areas of heathland would have been created and maintained by large grazing herds, which roamed wild across the heathy landscapes churning up the ground as they went. More recently, bare ground was created by humans, as commoners practised turbary – the right to dig up heather turfs to burn as a fuel. With turbary rarely exercised these days and large roaming herds a thing of the past, the wildlife that evolved to live on these bare patches has suffered a dramatic decline.
Grasses and scrub covered the bare ground within just a few years and with adequate grazing disappearing from many of our heaths, the scrub has been replaced with trees and the bare ground has become birch woodland.
However, all is not lost. By identifying an area known to have once been species rich heathland, we know that there will be dormant, yet viable, seeds from these plants in that location. This means we can quickly and cost-effectively create a specialised and incredibly important habitat, and then watch the species return within a matter of months. We create this bare ground, commonly called ‘scrapes’, by using machinery to scrape back the vegetation, leaf litter and the top few inches of soil. The remaining exposed, bare ground is full of dormant seeds, deposited decades before, and has abundant potential and promise.
Some of the species that are being helped include Bog pimpernel, the insect-eating sundew and marsh clubmoss. These bare areas also offer a place where the insects can burrow and lay their eggs. Heath tiger beetles, the mottled bee-fly are two examples.
For more information, please see the Wildlife Trust’s website www.hwt.org.uk