Grass. Something that a lot of people walk straight past and pay little or no attention to. After all, it’s ‘just grass’, isn’t it? But this particular group was one of the big eye openers for me when I started learning more about nature. It turns out, it’s not ‘just grass’. There are many different species of grass and they are surprisingly beautiful when you see them in flower. Over the past few weeks the grasses here at Lakenheath have been changing before our eyes, some are starting to look old now while other species are just appearing.
One particular species that I like is called Yorkshire fog. It’s easy to spot in amongst the other grasses due to the pink/purple hue that comes from the tips of the flower heads. It is a soft, downy grass to touch with grey/green leaves.
Photo credit: Ali Blaney - Yorkshire fog
The tricky thing with grasses can be how different a species looks as it grows – you may think they are two different species when you see them before flowering and during. A closer look at the grasses, often with a hand lens, will help with identification in these cases. The photo below shows Yorkshire fog in various growth stages, the specimens on the right were from a more open spot and look as though they are more sun-bleached than the specimens on the left.
Photo credit: Ali Blaney – Yorkshire fog in different stages of growth
Yorkshire fog is quite common and as is always the way, regarded as a weed by many. However this grass and all the others that appear in the countryside and also your gardens, provide homes to all sorts of wildlife. It always amazes me, when I stop to look closely as grasses, just how many different invertebrates you can spot in amongst the stems, on the flower heads and down near the roots. If you stand back and examine the grasses from above, this is when you’ll spot the damselflies alighting gently on the leaves or hovering over the top. Why not try leaving a wilder area in your garden somewhere, with taller grasses and wildflowers, even nettles. You’ll be amazed at the different wildlife that will start appearing.
While we like to leave as much of Lakenheath as natural as possible, we do have to cut the grasses and nettles in some places – how would our visitors get around the site otherwise?! So far this week we’ve been concentrating on cutting the trail edges out the back of the visitor centre. Even with the central path mown, when the edge vegetation gets to a certain height it starts to fall into the trail under it’s own weight, especially if it has rained which then means wet trousers for everyone who walks that way! So we strim the edge vegetation at an angle to prevent this from happening. We’ve also cut some vegetation in the bays down these trails, that we initially opened up over the winter. You’ll notice we haven’t re-opened them completely, this is because with everything being so late this year we don’t want to disturb any nests that might be lurking deeper into the bays. A couple of the bays now have views into the pools so keep an eye out for those. We’ve also left patches of vegetation that included plants just about to flower so these are also worth a look. You can get to and from New Fen viewpoint via these trails so if you're a regular visitor and always head off down the main hard track, why not try a different route next time and turn right out of the visitor centre instead of left?
While it seems like we’ve been strimming away the homes of some of our wildlife in the form of grasses, nettles and reeds, don’t fret! We’ve utilised the cuttings to create potential homes for other creatures. By raking up the cuttings from around the bays and leaving them in secretive piles, this becomes a home for other wildlife. As well as invertebrates, grass snakes love piles like this, especially to lay their eggs in. We know we have a good number of grass snakes here at Lakenheath and visitors often see them swimming across our numerous pools or even out basking in the sun. I’ve even had two grass snake encounters myself this week already (and it’s only Wednesday!) The first was on Monday, when I spotted a decent sized specimen in one of our sluices. The second was yesterday when a much smaller snake slithered past the gents toilet, under the fence and along the edge of the workshop doors. I willed the snake to keep going past the workshop and off into the grass and it almost made it, until it reached the very end and decided instead to slide under the doors and into the workshop. A quick rescue effort followed to ensure the snake got back out safely into its proper home and didn’t get into any trouble in amongst our tools.
We’ve got a bittern watch coming up tomorrow and judging by the number of bittern flights that visitors are reporting, it should be an exciting morning. I’ll update on that next week. To finish, here is a photo that Dave took at the weekend of a bittern telling a marsh harrier in no uncertain terms to move get out of their home!
Photo credit: Dave Rogers – ‘I say, would you mind pushing off?’