Wildlife podcasts created by County Wildlife Trusts around the country. Had a look through and these include series on Wild Cornwall (from Cornwall WT no less), Derbyshire Wildlife (by guess who ?), Greystones Wildlife Friendly Farm. There are also podcasts about the Dawn Chorus, Wildlife Gardening, Bats and the perennial Hedgehog and other things as well. Worth a look (or listen).

Follow this link to the Wildlife Trusts web site that provides follow up links to the participating Trusts

https://wildlifetrusts.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=589cf5d7d1ba1571a10c79d77&id=482fa25da9&e=ec349ace72

SUDS are a feature of all new housing developments and are designed to provide the capacity to prevent heavy rain overpowering the drainage system and causing local flooding. The excess can then drain away as the pressure on the drainage network dissipates. It is likely that you will have noticed these deep sided, sloped “pits”, the size and number will vary from location to location depending on numbers and geography. Although from a wildlife point of view a more shallowish and extensive area would be the ideal, in general SUDS ponds are steep deep sided basins, as essentially the builder wants to reduce the footprint of the feature – space is money.

Now I had assumed that they would be designed to be dry most of the time (principally from a safety point of view, but also to maximize capacity ), and some do seem to be grassed over and dry. However looking at the ones created locally this does not generally appear to be the case. Quite a few have reed growing in them and even in June they often have a thin layer of water in them. Is this deliberate to provide a shallow pond habitat or a product of ground water levels ? How beneficial might these be for wildlife ?

If they do retain some water into the summer this might benefit frogs and newts, and if they retain it  throughout the year other creatures like damsel and dragonflies might also be able to exploit them. It would also help if the banks were allowed to be reasonably wild ie not heavily mown. Although as many SUDS “ponds” are situated between the houses and the road I rather suspect neat and tidy will be the order of the day, at least until all the houses are sold !

As with housing, location, location, location also matters for wildlife. Sandwiched between housing and a road, a common practice, as I suspect it pushes the houses back from the road, the possibilities for colonisation is likely to be slow. But at the Wilford Fields wildlife site one of the SUDS is situated directly adjacent the site and when I was last visited seemed to be fairly wild (but dry) and can be viewed as an extension of the wildlife area.

The SUDS pond at the housing development by the Rushcliffe Country Park is tucked in a corner of the site at the back and also seems to be retaining some water over an extended period. It is adjacent to the Ruddington country park access path and the railway land beyond, so again somewhat more open to wider influence.

We tend to think of grass as just grass. In fact there are some 150 different  species of grass identified in the UK. Some are common and widespread, others are denizens of specialist environments such as mountains, moors and bogs, whilst a select few form the grasses that make up the ultimate man made specialist environments of amenity grassland, sports fields and grazing pastures. But for me one of the most fascinating facts about grass is that it didn`t really exist to any significant amounts until towards the end of the age of the dinosaurs. And really became widespread and ubiquitous across the world in the last 60 million years (along with the insects and animals that exploit them).

Grass diversity is important as many insects identify specific grass types as their egg laying plant of choice. So for example many of the hundreds of moth species are grass specialists. It is also an important food source for insects and larger animals both wild and domesticated. These tend to exhibit adaptations to cope with the silica in grass blades, which creates heavy wear on teeth and may also inhibit digestion. So creatures habitually grazing on grass have enlarged teeth (or mandibles) or constantly refresh their dentures. The other grass survival strategy involves fresh growth from it`s base so it can recover from heavy grazing (or mowing), fire and draught.

There are probably some 30-40 grasses found locally. Some are relatively straightforward to identify, once you get your eye in, such as Cocksfoot, False Oat Grass, Yellow Oat Grass (these first three are a major constituent of many country road verges), Perennial Ryegrass (a common constituent of man made grassland) plus Crested Dogstail, Meadow Foxtails, Sweet Vernal Grass, Quaking Grass and Yorkshire Fog. But others, such as the Meadow Grasses, Bents, Fescues, Hair Grasses and Bromes  require an ID book, a hand lens, patience and paracetmol to pin down to a specific species.

But even if you don`t want to go that far, when walking through a grassland, don`t just look at the showy flowers, pay attention to the varied structures of the grasses, they are a key component of the complex web of bio-diversity that makes up the natural world.

This week saw publication of alarming news about the state of butterflies in the UK. A beautiful and important part of the UK’s wildlife, they are highly sensitive indicators of the health of the environment and play crucial roles in the food chain as well as being pollinators of plants.

The State of the UK’s Butterflies 2015 report found that 76% of the UK’s resident and regular migrant butterflies declined in abundance, occurrence or both over the last four decades.

Now Butterfly Conservation is warning that time is running out to save some of Britain’s best-loved insects, with the latest Red List assessment of butterflies, published this week, revealing a 26% increase in the number of species threatened with extinction. For more details, go to:

https://butterfly-conservation.org/news-and-blog/half-of-british-butterfly-species-on-new-red-list

Conserving butterflies will improve our whole environment for wildlife and enrich the lives of people now and in the future.  To better understand why butterflies matter, go to:

https://butterfly-conservation.org/butterflies/why-butterflies-matter

One of the ways we can help make a difference for butterflies and other pollinators is to make our gardens more welcoming places for them, and Butterfly Conservation has published  two invaluable guides to help us: ‘Pit stops for Pollinators’ and ‘Gardening for Butterflies’.  They can be found at

https://butterfly-conservation.org/pit-stops-for-pollinators?fbclid=IwAR2w08rQE1YJLsp4LVj0crPvwSQwSmOaNDPcto6kjOky0gOPEvYiyngTS7w

and

https://butterfly-conservation.org/how-you-can-help/get-involved/gardening/gardening-for-butterflies

In his Weather Eye column in The Times on Monday 23^rd May, Paul Simons reflected on orchids’ role as a good indicator of Britain’s warming climate.  In recent years, several foreign orchids have begun to appear here. Quite common in the Mediterranean, the Tongue Orchid Serapias lingua has begun to establish itself in England, having been found in Essex a few years ago. Last June, the Small-flowered Tongue Orchid Serapias parviflora was discovered on the roof garden of a London tower block and, subsequently, at sites in Suffolk and Cornwall. A third foreign orchid to arrive is Himantoglossum robertianum, a close cousin of the resident Lizard Orchid, discovered in Oxfordshire.

It is thought that orchid seeds are so light they are easily blown across the Channel – so have they been coming here unknown for many years? – and new varieties are only now growing and flowering as a consequence of the changing, warmer, climate.

In Rushcliffe we have a relatively small number of resident orchid species compared to Southern England.  One of them, the Bee Orchid Ophrys apifera, found at various sites including Wilford Claypits, Skylarks and Rushcliffe Country Park is experiencing something of a boom. In the 1960s it was largely confined to grassland in southern and southeastern England, but in recent years has spread northwards, appearing in different habitats including disturbed ground, reaching Scotland in 2003.  Interestingly, although an insect mimic whose flower imitates the shape, markings and furry texture of a bee, it is largely self-pollinating.

Bee Orchid (Chris Overton)

Sadly, the good news of the spread of Bee Orchids may not be entirely representative of the situation as a whole: in her Nature Notes in the next day’s Times, Melissa Harrison writing about Greater Butterfly orchids noted that “like most of the 50-odd orchid species in the UK, greater butterfly orchids have declined sharply since the middle of the last century…”