On 6th June, Chesterblade Hills hosted their inaugural annual Ecology Day gathering of ecologists, scientists, detectorists, green finance specialists and environmental land manager advisors. Over thirty people came together at the farm’s off grid Green Heart Venue (https://chills.org.uk/green-heart-venue/) for a fantastic day of knowledge exchange and forward thinking.
The reason for hosting this gathering was the realisation that the various monitoring groups rarely cross paths to discuss findings or compare data from the surveys being undertaken. Trends would therefore be missed regarding what is happening on the ground. This makes future visioning and environmental land management of the site less effective than it otherwise would be.
There are also large gaps in monitoring and surveying in terms of species being studied as well as physical tracts of land not being covered. Getting everyone together to share their learnings and knowledge with each other helps form a more cohesive approach to help nature recovery at Chesterblade Hills.
Wood Pasture Creation
In the morning session, each person introduced themselves to the group and described the work they were doing at Chesterblade Hills and what results the various forms of monitoring and surveying were producing. One of the largest groups on site is the Forest Research team from the Forestry Commission. Currently, Chesterblade Hills is the largest England Woodland Creation Offer natural colonisation woodland creation site, so the Forest Research team have a number of different monitoring quadrants across the two hundred acre project area.
Here, they are measuring how deer affect the ability of trees to naturally colonise. Native broadleaf saplings have also been planted at a very low density of one hundred stems per hectare, with three different brands of biodegradable tree shelters used to compare and contrast efficacy. Drone footage and eDNA sampling are planned to be used to monitor how the habitats are developing and evolving over the coming decades into a wood pasture mosaic across the landscape.
Wetland Habitat
ADAS is the UK’s largest provider of independent agricultural and environmental consultancy, policy advice and research and development. A young team of enthusiastic ADAS scientists regularly come to the farm and camp at the farm’s wild camping site which specialises in group camping and mindful gatherings (https://chills.org.uk/wild-group-camping/). They were currently on site and were pleased to announce to the Ecology Day gathering that they had now found dormice at Chesterblade Hills. We now hope to establish an official dormouse monitoring project here.
The ADAS group also monitored the ponds and wetland habitats on farm, and reported findings of various frogs, toads and newts, including great crested newts. Around forty ponds, bunds and scrapes have been created on site over the last four years, and this has also given rise to the increasing appearance of wetland birds and insects, as well as improving water quality and mitigating flooding. Chesterblade Hills is in the upper catchment of the River Brue, so these features help the lower catchment areas such as the Somerset Levels.
Representatives from the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) at the Ecology Day also spoke about how their funding streams had helped Chesterblade Hills create such a large number of new ponds and wetlands habitats as part of the Hills To Levels scheme and great crested newt schemes. Representatives from the Somerset Otter Group had not as yet discovered otters on site but would keep looking and in the meantime would monitor and survey other riverbank species, such as water voles.
The organisation Reimaginging The Levels were also present. Their community volunteer led work facilitates growing tree and hedgerow saplings to distribute throughout the Somerset Levels river catchment to help mitigate flooding and aid water quality. At Chesterblade Hills we have undertaken both hedgerow and small copse planting on site with this group to aid their flooding and water quality issues in the lower catchment.
Animal and Plant Species Specialists
Over the last thirty years, the farm has increasingly focussed to a more environmentally friendly and nature conservation based set of management principles. The cessation of annual flail hedgerow cutting has allowed the mixed native species hedgerows to grow out and up, with hawthorn and blackthorn especially suckering out into the field margins.
In 2021, farmed livestock were removed from the farm and this has allowed areas across the site to rewild, along with the woodland and wetland features already described above. The Rare Plants Group surveys have revealed there are over two hundred plant species in the most species rich meadows on the site. The consequence of all this is a greater abundance and variety of animals. Also represented at the Ecology Day were the Hawk and Owl Trust, the Somerset Badger Group, and other individual specialists in bats, birds, moths and butterflies. They all related to the gathering how longer vegetation has given rise to more small mammals, insects and invertebrates, which have in turn led to more abundance and variety of both small birds and larger birds of prey.
Particularly loved in our landscape are the hares, bats, lapwing, heron, ducks, barn owls, swifts, goldfinches, buzzards, red kites, sparrowhawks and kestrels.
Collaboration with Universities
Links have been established with a number of universities to enable students to use the habitats at Chesterblade Hills in dissertation study topics. For example, Bath Spa University students undertaking the Wildlife Conservation degree visit the site to monitor and survey the change that is happening as the farm transitions from commercial farming actions to regenerative practices and habitat and wildlife conservation.
Bangor University students, together with students from Freiburg University in Germany, have also visited to study our two hundred acre natural colonisation woodland creation project and how the low density mosaic planting of native broadleaf saplings dovetails into this. This visit involved a walk through the project area with wide ranging debates amongst the group exploring many different related topics. It was fascinating to hear how practices and ideas differ between the UK and Germany. Cross pollination of thinking of this kind can only be a good thing as we can all learn from each other.
Outcomes from the day
At the end of the Ecology Day, everyone present were asked three main questions to wrap up the day. The first was how can we best collectively collate, share, analyse and make use of all the data that the various monitoring and surveying groups collect? The top answer by consensus was that we needed a single shared format uploaded to a single shared cloud data management framework. Other suggestions included eDNA surveying, bioacoustics, bio blitz events, soil probes, and using apps such as eBird and iNaturalist.
The second question was what species would you love to see arriving here at Chesterblade Hills? These answers included grey partridge, beaver, otter, nesting lapwing, cuckoo, pine marten, large blue butterfly, deadwood invertebrates, breeding red kite, white tail eagle, small blue butterfly, stone chat, whinchat, wild boar, nightingale, European pond turtle and eel.
The third question was what management actions could we do here to make the environment better? Answers included: engaging with the community more (creating interpretation boards in the landscape with QR codes and field names, hosting bio blitz events and educational visits, exploring local Facebook groups to find people to manage the wildlife cameras), establish more deadwood and wetland features, explore more landscape scale collaborations and partnerships, monitor if ‘doing nothing’ in some places is adversely affecting anything, create amphitheatre butterfly banks, dormouse monitoring project, and holding a one thousand year mindset and plan to create a complex, multifunctional and diverse landscape that is engaged with the local community.
A fantastic day was had by all, and we are now on the way towards our overall aim to have monitoring and surveying across the whole site of a more comprehensive number of plant and animal species. We all look forward to another gathering next summer to share stories, knowledge and see what progress has been made. If you’re reading this and want to get involved, get in touch!
