Blogger: Communications Officer Aggie Rothon
I am incredibly lucky to live where I do. If I leave my house in any direction I can always find myself surrounded by the magnificence of nature. So I’m not missing out, now that the nights are drawing in and I have had to reroute my after-work dog walk. These autumnal evenings we walk out through the shelter of the copse behind the house and out on to the open grassland beyond. These past weeks the sun has been a bright orange sphere on the horizon, nestling in to pillows of grey sky as day slides in to night. The grass sticks up in blonde tufts, almost glowing white in the dusky light and gathering teardrops on individual stems as the evening mists lower. The barn owls hunt here, quartering back and forth, and the kestrels sit in the fringe of trees trilling loudly to one another. In the summer, meadow buttercup and ox-eye daisy grow tangled with the grass and red deer lie hidden but for their craggy heads.
I’m lucky that I live right beside grassland like this, but they can be found all over our eastern counties. Sandy soils support acid grassland alongside heather heaths supporting leggy birds-foot trefoil and the delicate purple harebell. Wet grassland is a common site in the Broads, dotted with the pink stars of ragged robin or the fluffy heads of meadowsweet. And how fortunate we are to share open commons in our villages and rural hamlets.
The only trouble is we’re not looking after are grasslands very well these days. In fact we have actually lost 95% of our species rich grassland since the 1940’s. We’ve ploughed it up because we need to grow more crops and we have reseeded grasslands to make them faster growing and more consistent to produce better hay. But the biggest single cause of our loss of wildlife rich grassland is neglect. We’ve stopped cutting small areas of grassland for hay to feed a small number of animals and we’ve stopped keeping small numbers of animals to graze small areas of land. This means our grasslands all too easily revert to scrub and woodland as year upon year we overlook the need to graze or cut them.
Through looking at the bigger picture we often forget to look after what is under our noses, or round the corner from home. We don’t recognise that the small parts of the jigsaw that make up our countryside are what create our greater experience of the world. To maintain the things we take for granted; the barn owls, skylarks, the rainbow colours of our wild flowers we need to look after our local grasslands. If we all look after the jigsaw pieces, together we’ll complete the whole puzzle.
As featured in the EDP, Saturday 26 November