So, I’ve been thinking for a while now that it would be good to start taking more photos of the work we do out on the reserve and blog about it to give you all a better understanding of what’s going on and why. I’ve recently got a fancy new phone with a camera, so I don’t really have an excuse anymore – until I drop it in the reedbed that is!
Let’s start with today (which is what we’ve been doing most of the week). I’ve been up on Warton Crag with a group of volunteers clearing an area of scrub. Richard (the other assistant warden) and I went through with chainsaws last week (making a mess) – so this week we’ve had the volunteers clearing the mess up! Lots of tangled hawthorn and blackthorn that needed to be either made into a brash pile, or burned. It isn’t half prickly though! – favourite quote of the day came from Adam: “if I could go back to any point in time, it would be before plants evolved thorns!”
Copyright Alasdair Grubb
We are coppicing these areas with two main aims: In the short term, clearing this area will let much more light in, enabling more flowers to flourish – especially violets and primroses. This will benefit the fantastic array of invertebrate life we’ve got up on the crag, including the endangered pearl bordered and high brown fritillary butterflies. Within about 5-10 years (depending on deer browsing pressure) the coppiced stumps of hawthorn, blackthorn and gorse, will have regenerated enough to start shading these flowers out. By this time, however, they have become brilliant nesting habitat for birds such as garden warblers and bullfinches. If left to mature further, the scrub becomes unfavourable nesting habitat, so we will then coppice it again. We coppice areas of scrub in rotation, so that there is a variety of age structures all the time, ensuring that there is suitable habitat for both birds and butterflies.
The main target species of today’s work were the pearl bordered, small pearl bordered and the high brown fritillary butterflies. All three rely on a rich resource of violets (their larval foodplant), which tend to come through with a great flush 1-3 years after coppice.
Although we do make habitat brash piles with some of the cut material, there is no way we could do this with it all – there’s too much! So we burn the rest of it. As you can see, the fire has been built on a double layer log bed with iron sheets. This is to prevent the ground below scorching – the whole area is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
Here is some jelly ear fungus that our volunteer Ann found – it really does look like an ear doesn’t it! Look out for it growing on elder trees, there’s loads of it about at the moment. (Image copyright Alasdair Grubb)