Well Done EDDC

The District Council often suffer criticism but people on last Sunday’s fortnightly wildlife walk with the Sid Valley Biodiversity Group were delighted to see that EDDC’s management of the Sid Meadow in The Byes is going well with lots of different wild flowers and grasshoppers hopping everywhere.

Sid Meadow, including the area called the roly-poly field, was left as a public open space in the will of Annie Leigh-Browne in the 1930s. It is one of the green spaces that EDDC is managing for wildlife, with the help of volunteers from Friends of The Byes. It is being managed as a traditional hay meadow left to grow until late summer before being cut and the hay collected, but there are clear pathways cut regularly for people to walk.

The lower meadow was cleared, scarified and sown with wildflower seeds a few years ago but, as usually happens, most of those flowers were not suited to the site and their flowers no longer appear. The main reason is that many of the brightest flowers, such as poppies, cornflowers and corncockle are annuals from arable fields. They set seed after the summer but the seeds lie dormant until the ground is disturbed by the farmer ploughing.

Having been managed properly for several years, the normal meadow flowers are becoming established. These are often less showy than their arable counterparts but they are the basis for a food web including a wide range of small creatures such as grasshoppers, crickets and moths and butterflies. Two notable plants that have survived from the sowing are the striking blue chicory and the blousy pink musk mallows.

The grass in the lower meadow is sprinkled with the delightful white stars of lesser stitchwort and the yellow bird’s foot trefoil, so called because the clusters of seed pods look like the toes of a bird’s foot. As the area was stripped of top soil previously, the grass is rather thin and patchy and this leaves room for the flowers to spread themselves.

The soil in the upper meadow wasn’t stripped away and there is a stronger growth of grass such as cock’s-foot, the spreading seed heads are supposed to look like a chicken’s foot, something that takes a bit of imagination. This shades out some of the smaller wild flowers but has the bonus that the coarser grasses are the natural home and food source for butterfly caterpillars such as the ringlet and meadow brown. The ringlets are only just emerging, but there are plenty of meadow browns in there already.

The grass is less strong in one area of the upper meadow because it has been sown with yellow rattle, a plant that is parasitic on the grass, hooking into the roots and stealing the sugar being made by the host. This does weaken the grass and allows some of the wild flowers to creep in, but it will have a negative effect on the butterflies. I hope the area is now left to come into its own balance with just the traditional cut and clear management.

Things are going well for the nature plan, but there is an unnecessary threat. Two areas of the upper meadow were planted with dense clusters of young trees ten years ago and this reduced the meadow area significantly. More and more trees are being planted in The Byes but it will be a disaster if more are planted on the meadow. Planting trees is generally seen as a good thing but the trees shade out ground cover and compete for water and nutrients at the expense of the meadow plants.

Flower rich meadows are one of the most threatened habitats in southern England, their decline is one of the causes of the crash in the populations of butterflies, bees and other insects and the small birds that feed on them. We have plenty of places to plant trees in the valley, but if we want our grandchildren and their children to see butterflies and hear grasshoppers we need to recreate more of our traditional meadows not plant trees all over them.

Ed Dolphin