Writtle Wildlife Watch, October 2015

Image courtesy of Wikipedia
'Seawall' by Liftarn 

I was out and about the other day on the gorgeous Essex coast when I got chatting to two women who were walking round the sea wall. The walls are one of the joys of the Essex coastline, providing the walker with a panoramic view of both the sea and the land, with the former desperate to breach the defence and take back the territory we have stolen from it; the latter cheekily thumbing its nose from behind the safety of the wall.

 

The women were going the long route around the wall and were kitted out with boots, fleeces and binoculars, so clearly they had an interest in the natural world. There was much to see. With the tide half out, waders had been gathering in large numbers and a flock of over 200 Golden Plovers was passing overhead as we chatted. I had already seen Harriers over distant Northey Island and had been chuffed to bits to find a Pompilid wasp dragging its prey, a Woodlouse Spider, across the path. 



Moth tent

We remarked on the huge number of moth ‘tents’ we could see in the surrounding scrub and I said it was good to see so many this year, there having been far fewer in recent years. These tents protect the larvae while they grow and can be quite surprisingly robust. One of the women said there were far too many moth tents and she hoped they did not kill off the trees. 

 

In other words, ‘trees good, moths bad’. This got me thinking. 

 

Firstly, what do we regard as ‘wildlife’? 

 

There appears to be a hierarchy in the way we regard our wildlife and this is often reinforced with spectacular ignorance by the British press. The famous biologist E. O. Wilson advanced the notion of ‘biophilia’ but perhaps we are instead in the grip of ‘biophobia’. Mammals, birds and trees: good. Amphibians, dragonflies and fungi: so so. Wasps, snakes and thistles: bad. Sadly, the consequence is that often only the first group actually count as ‘wildlife’ as the others are too horrible to contemplate. Why is this? Are we conditioned at an early age to appreciate the cute, fluffy and accessible and to despise the challenging, awkward and stingy? If so, we have problems, as ecosystems rely on far more than the cute and fluffy to make them work. Where would we be without the pollinators (including wasps and flies) and the detritivores (slugs and slime moulds)? We would have no food and we would be up to our knees in waste, that’s where! 

 

Secondly, why are the British obsessed with trees? 

 

I suspect this is partly to do with what we regard as ‘nature’ and partly as a result of confusion around general green issues such as climate change, global temperature regulation and sustainable timber harvesting. More trees must be good, because we keep telling ourselves it is the case. 

 

People sometimes say to me ‘Well, France and Germany have far more trees than we do’. But it’s not a competition. And even if we could, do we really want to cover our wonderful heathlands, fens and grasslands in trees? Of course not. 

 

Thirdly, what’s wrong with a dead tree? 

 

My co-chattees (as Alan Partridge may have described them) were concerned that the trees might be killed by the presence of the moths. I do not want to seem mean but my first thought was ‘so what?’, although I promise I did not actually say it out loud. 

 

The fact is, we are now beginning to realise that dead wood has a key role to play in the way ecosystems work and we need a lot more of it. Conservationists now wince at our collective reaction to the storm of 1987 after which everyone rushed to tidy up the countryside and remove all that lovely dead wood. A handy publication is the Forestry Commission’s ‘Life in the Deadwood’ which I urge you to find online. A dead tree is a good tree! 

 

And on that happy note, until next time…

 

 

Written by Alan Roscoe

The challenge of the sea...

This entry comes from the fantastic Writtle conservation team and looks at how the sea impacts on the environment.

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Winter is here and wouldn’t it be nice to jet off somewhere exotic and faraway? The Maldives perhaps? Or perhaps not…..it seems that particular island group is under imminent threat from rising sea levels. To be precise, the water around the islands is currently rising at 9mm a year and the islanders may have to leave their homes before the year 2100. 

But sea level rise is affecting us here in Britain as well, although clearly not in such a drastic manner. Have a look at a map of the Essex coast and the contour lines show how very close to sea level many of us live. With slowly rising sea levels and the prospect of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, we have been forced to reconsider how we manage these threats, especially on the east coast of England. 

Image courtesy of federico stevanin at FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

The attraction of ‘hard’ defences, such as sea walls, has lost some of its appeal, not least because of the huge capital cost associated with constructing and maintaining such defences. So what to do? Over the past 20 years Essex has been at the leading edge of a new approach called ‘managed realignment’. This is a process whereby land which is currently protected by sea walls is returned to the sea by knocking through the walls and letting the water in. This way, the effects of any sea level rise or storm surges can be softened by allowing the water more room to spread out, thus reducing the overall impact, especially further up estuaries where waterways narrow.

The best known realignment sites in Essex are at Tollesbury, Abbotts Hall south of Colchester and now Wallasea Island. The sheer scale of these projects is hugely impressive in itself but this type of management is not always popular due to the loss of land which has previously been farmed. And indeed  those who oppose realignment often refer to it as ‘managed retreat’.

But one habitat which seems almost certain to benefit is that great Essex speciality, saltmarsh. In recent decades our saltmarshes have become squeezed between the sea and the sea walls. But by ‘relaxing’ the entire system of management and allowing the water in, we have begun to create new saltmarsh behind the sea walls where none has existed for (in some cases) several hundred years. We are perhaps, simply returning to the sea what was only ever borrowed.

For more information on our degree-level conservation courses, please visit our website: http://writtle.ac.uk/UG-Conservation-and-Environment