BOZEAT CONSERVATION & ENVIRONMENT GROUP

Wildlife around Bozeat

Birds

Flowers & Grasses

From articles written for 
Bozeat Matters magazine  ....

In the area we manage at the back of the church, the snowdrops are flowering. These will soon be followed by violets, self-heal and purple ground ivy.  We are looking forward to seeing if the cowslips, wild daffodils and fritillaries we planted flower well this year.

If you have any old plant stems about 18ins/45cm long left over after garden tidying please leave them round the back of the church.

There are about 20,000 churchyards, burial grounds and cemeteries in the UK. Many of these were carved out of meadow land when churches were first built.

They represent a large proportion of the remnants of ancient meadow and grassland that has been unimproved by modern agriculture. Careful management means churchyards can be a sanctuary for wild plants, insects, birds and other animals.

Please feel free to come and help on the first Saturday of each month - 9.30 to 11.30 - or just to walk around and watch how the area changes with the seasons

The wildlife area behind the church contains several quite large patches of nettles which I know many people consider unsightly. Stinging nettles are the main food plant of the caterpillars of some of out most beautiful butterflies. So as well as flowers in summer we also need nettles if we want more butterflies.

Small tortoiseshell, peacock, red admiral and sometimes comma and painted lady butterflies lay their eggs on young nettle growth in spring.

Over the year we are planning to extend the number of meadow flowers and hope to see more scabious, knapweed and lady's bedstraw growing in the long grass.

This should also encourage more butterflies. Our other current project is collecting bundles of hollow sticks or plant stems in order to make safe places for over-wintering insects to hibernate.

The caterpillars leave the plants by late June to pupate elsewhere. This is when we cut the nettles down to just above ground level so that a second generation of butterflies is attracted to lay their eggs on the re-growth.

When the young caterpillars of small tortoiseshell and peacocks hatch they live together in large groups. Red admiral caterpillars are solitary and live in a rolled up nettle leaf.

The advantage of breeding on nettles is that grazing animals leave the nettles alone. In fact more than 40 species of insects, bugs and beetles are either partially of wholly dependent on nettles.

The most common of these is the ladybird whose black, spotted larvae are a common sight on nettles. Just like the adult ladybird, the larvae are voracious eaters of aphids and very useful in the garden provided they are not killed by insecticide.

Lacewings, and some hoverflies as well as birds such as blue-tits will all help clear up aphids if we have the confidence to let their numbers increase and not spray our roses!

Christina Downey.

Take a look at the BBC Radio 4 web pages and listen again to many interesting nature programmes. In particular there is one which was broadcast Monday 27th June 2005 “The Soft Estate” which talked about our highway verges......

“Road verges could be viewed as just narrow strips of land that pass
us by in a blur through a car window”

There are a number of  interesting links to other various web sites .....

You are able to reach us by email -  villageteam@bozeat.info with comments and suggestions
for new pages, links to other sites of interest that we can include within this website.
Please look at the magazine page for the diary dates for the village.

Updated 03 December 2010