Horfield Common Wildlife Management Plan
About:
Horfield Common is one of the most popular public green spaces in Bristol. It covers an area of approximately 20 Ha if you include Wellington Playing Field. Whilst it's a lovely place, the majority of it until recently was just huge expanses of boring short grass with lines of free standing trees (typical parkland) - a far cry from what it would have looked like over 100 years ago when it would have been teaming with wildlife. Whilst some efforts have been made to improve the situation for local wildlife such as putting up bird boxes and leaving some areas to grow long, this is the most ambitious plan yet.
Meadows on Horfield Common
The creation of new meadows is an exciting, fascinating, and in the long run, very rewarding process. The method in which most meadows are created today is unfortunately rarely done so in consideration and understanding of how meadows and their ecosystem actually work. Often turf is removed or the ground made bare and seeds of various sorts are sown. Annual ornamental mixes with useless non-native's such as California Poppies, Phacelia and the likes (bold, bright and colourful) - are often promoted as 'pollinator friendly' when they are anything but. At best they may attract a few Honey Bees and Hoverflies. They are designed to bring a burst of short-term colour and they give the wrong impression to the public as to what a meadow should look like. Really they are just an extension of cultivating the wild and a 'green-wash'. Perennial mixes on the other hand are widely used in so-called 'conservation' and 'rewilding projects' and for 'offsetting biodiversity loss' from new developments - the situations where it is really important to get things right! These mixes nearly always contain dodgy non-native and agricultural variants of wildflowers and even when they don't, they still threaten the existing local wild and unique plant populations, by mingling and spoiling the local gene pool with seeds which may have originated from Cornwall, Scotland or far worse - from outside of the UK. Not only is sowing seeds potentially hugely destructive but it is also boring and cheating.
What creates a proper meadow is down to long-term management, observation and patience. Here on Horfield Common we are setting out to achieve just that by making use of the least-used land - the margins, corners and areas not regularly used for football, picnics and other social activities but at the same time integrating them so they are not out of sight and so we create a mosaic effect, which makes the overall look of Horfield Common more varied and not just a boring desert of short grass. With different areas managed on different cutting regimes - some cut once a year, others on alternating years, every few years and some not at all, we can promote different floral compositions (habitats) which in turn cater for a different set of wildlife and each broadening the scope of Horfield Common's overall biodiversity.
The initial stage is to leave areas uncut for a period which allows us to see what already exists. This is a really important and interesting process as it tells us information about the land you couldn't possibly know when it was just short grass; and invertebrate life very quickly moves in. Grasshoppers, spiders, moths, butterflies, craneflies and tiny parasitic wasps, you name it! Ant hills also appear which is a really good sign as ants are essential in the health of meadows and dispersing seeds, many of which are brought back to the nest where they inevitably reach a perfect seed medium of loose friable sun-warmed soil in which to germinate.
When it comes to cutting sites, on some of them, we focus our attention on raking up the hay and spreading it out onto areas which remain regularly cut so that it rots down quickly. It is also a very important stage in improving species-richness (and therefore the biodiversity of meadows) as the process opens up the ground, letting in more light and exposing bare patches for new plants to naturally colonise as well as reducing nutrient levels so that more dominant species are kept in check and do not outcompete the more sensitive plants. The disturbance also awakens already present seeds in the soil which may have been lying dormant for a very long time. In some sites we are planning on making more use of this incredible process by scarifying and turning over the soil. By awakening even more of these tiny biological time capsules... we can essentially bring back plants (which have gone locally extinct) from the dead! Currently we have to do everything manually but hopefully in the future we can have some mechanical work with proper hay collectors to do this back-breaking (but very rewarding) work for us and over time we can make Horfield Common a much better place for wildlife and people.
