Tania Crockett, Morecambe Bay Community Engagement Officer for Leighton Moss and Morecambe Bay Limestones and Wetlands Nature Improvement Area provides our guest blog today...
Just over a week ago, I was joined by over 200 people at the Arnside Bioblitz. In the one day race againt time we found over 460 different types of plants and animals across three nature reserves around Arnside! Although I didn't have to be up for the dawn chorus event, the bioblitz started at 4am and continued throughout the day, finishing with a night walk at 11pm. Staff from across the partner organisations of the Morecambe Bay Nature Improvement Area project, Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre and Arnside Youth Hostel all came together with an amazing 35 volunteer nature-experts who led guided walks and helped us identify what we found! It was truly great to see so many people getting up close to nature and having such fun. There were a wide variety of people taking part, locals and holiday-makers, and it was wonderful to hear comments like “wow”, “that’s amazing” and “this is brilliant!” as they got down and dirty with a range of nature finding activities, including looking for small mammals and brilliant beetles.
So what were the highlights and exciting finds? Well, with so many species found and identified it’s hard to know where to start, but some of the highlights would have to be...starting with the bold and the beautiful perhaps, the great prominent moth, fly orchid, may bug and slow worm, herb paris and marsh tit. However, with experts on hand, we were also able to find and identify many of the smaller and harder to identify insects that might normally pass us by, such as a wood boring beetle Rhopalomesites tardyi,at Grubbins Wood. This species had not been recorded in Cumbria since 1999 and is nationally scarce. We also found the Ramsons Hoverfly Portevinia maculate, which is not commonly recorded in Cumbria. The larvae develop in the stem bases and bulbs of wild garlic (ramsons) and the very sluggish adults can normally be observed sitting on the leaves (or on nearby foliage), particularly in May when the plant is flowering.
As the day drew to a close I caught up with Teresa Frost, Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre Manager at Tullie House Museum. She said "It was fantastic to see so much expertise being pooled to get a snapshot of the wildlife that makes the Arnside area so unique and special. The hundreds of records of different species are now available for all kinds of uses and will even feed into the national picture. A lot of specialists work on their own usually, so to see the experts swapping stories and sharing their enthusiasm with families was brilliant. A lot of people were introduced to the addictive world of wildlife recording – we hope some of them will ‘catch the bug’! It's also great to have recorded 166 new species in the county database."
One of the reasons that these nature reserves are full of such a rich variety of species, is down to the band of volunteers who help year-round with the practical management of the habitats – keeping them in the best possible condition for the nationally important species that thrive here.
All the people that took part in the day made a valuable contribution to the knowledge that we have about the wonderful wildlife in this part of Morecambe Bay. As I sat down to share the success of the day with you all the importance of our work hit home. The State of Nature report had been launched whilst we were looking under stones, in ponds and rivers to record the nature we had. With the knowledge we gathered that day we will be better placed to ensure that these reserves are managed in the right way to enable these species to thrive into the future. We are working with land managers across Morecambe Bay to create, restore and connect habitats – making more space for nature and helping to reverse the dramatic decline in UK wildlife that has taken place in recent decades.
But the work won't only take place there. Many people taking part in the ‘blitz’ also did their bit to create homes for nature in their own back yard or gardens too – making bug homes out of paper straws and butterfly feeders using old milk bottle tops!
Jenny