On BBC H&W local radio this morning there was quite a big piece on the recent scrub clearance work carried out on Cherry Orchard Nature Reserve.
I understand that there are strong views on this work and I generally share the view that nature abhors tidiness. I agree with the need to protect and enhance this much loved wild area. BUT how best to do this – should we let nature just do its thing or should we be managing for wildlife?
Before mankind came to completely dominate our environment our countryside would have been a mixture of woods, grasses and scrub managed by wandering herbivores which would in turn have been kept in check by species like wolves. Let’s be realistic, going back to nature by introducing roaming bison and wolves is probably not going to happen so close to Worcester city centre!
This site left to its own devices with the growing bramble thickets was rapidly losing many of the species it once supported. This area used to be much more of a mix of scrub and grassland with abundant wildflowers, butterflies, insects, reptiles and birds. The lack of recent management has meant that the brambles covered most of the site and it had lost the open areas. The result being that there were now just narrow paths through the scrub with the loss of basking habitat for reptiles, food source for a lot of butterflies and insect and seeds that birds rely on for food. I have known this site for over 20 years and have seen a big decrease in the biodiversity in recent years.
Scrub removal is quite a standard management practice for a nature reserve but I agree it will not look at its best straight after the work has been carried out. Over 97% of our wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930’s. The nature reserve was previously managed for wildflowers but over many years when the scrub bashing and mowing stopped the brambles and thickets increased in size. The scrub bashing that has now taken place is probably a bit more than I would have liked but a large amount of bramble / scrub thicket remains in a mosaic spread across the site. Open spaces also support species like slow worms that need open ground to bask in the sun to enable them to move whilst having some cover in the remaining more woody / scrub part if the site.
The aim of what has been done is to create space for wildflowers to grow naturally from the existing seed bank. These flowers and herbs will encourage pollinators like butterflies and bees and provide a food source for birds – all of which would be absent in a simple thicket of brambles.
Dr Peter Holmes, Natural England, said: “Dense scrub is of lower wildlife value. Warblers and other song birds need a mosaic of scrub and grassland and in fact most birds are found on the edge of the scrub where there are more insects for them to feed on.”
The key thing to stress here is that mosaics of open areas and thickets create more boundaries and it is on those edges that the best habitats are created supporting the greatest amount of different wildlife.