I’m still searching for an alternative title for the “bioblitz” (those terrible war connections!), but as an exercise in nature connectedness, complete absorption, learning, humility and fun with a dash of competitiveness, it has few equals.
Normally a bioblitz involves identifying as many life forms as possible in one place over one day. Since the owners of this 30-acre former farm have an inventory of 1,100 fellow residents already, our goal was more modest: 10 new species for their list. Some additions were admittedly less than exciting. Traps set the night before yielded several of a moth family called “the pugs”: 50 tiny elongated flakes of greyness with lines of minute dark-grey dots. They have names like grey pug, plain pug, shaded and mottled pug, but ours was perhaps the masterpiece in anonymity – common pug.
Yet it was new and thus equal in bioblitz status to more noteworthy finds, including a speckled bush cricket. This extraterrestrial beast possesses an inner-body glow of fluorescent lime and manoeuvres on six stilt-like legs twice the length of the ink-freckled abdomen. Equally, an arachnid named the “cucumber spider” needs little further gloss to convey its own thrilling colours.
As in all natural history work, it wasn’t what we set out to achieve that moved me most, but a realisation that crept up sideways as we went about the task. Cosford has been in a countryside stewardship scheme for three decades, and it’s astonishing how far it has journeyed towards its present wild conditions. Where once were arable crops propped up with fertilisers and pesticides are now 10,000 globes of golden yellow spread over the rolling terrain by a flower called creeping cinquefoil. Among this was a busy weave of five bumblebee species.
In one 5 metre by 5 metre plot, we counted 112 bee orchids and as many pyramidal orchids. All this is in a habitat that attracts the least subsidy support, yet yields to this country possibly more biodiversity than any other – scrub. That indefinable mix of young tree and thorn bush within a scrappy mosaic of flower-rich turf. Scrub needs a rebrand more urgently than the bioblitz, but bring the two together and you have something like an English version of wildlife heaven.
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