Page 13 - Wildlife News August 2019
P. 13
Space for nature
Today, the UK is one of the
most nature-depleted
nations in the world, but it’s
not too late to help our
wildlife recover. Simon
Barnes finds out how the
fortunes of three much-
loved species can be
transformed by protecting
and connecting their
wild habitat.
Space for bees We need insects: 80% of our crops, as well as Red-tailed bumblebee: Nick
fruits, herbs and most garden and wild flowers are Upton/2020VISION
pollinated by bees, wasps, beetles and flies.
“Only connect!” EM Forster’s words – So we need to make it possible for a little roughness around the edges. So
from his novel Howard’s End – are about bees to travel by road. Roadside verges communication matters: you can’t impose
human relationships, but let’s borrow can be seen as long, thin nature reserves: conservation, it has to be carried out
them, for they say a great deal about the places that allow bees to travel small with the will of us all. And that again is
world we live in today. “Live no longer in distances, spread and increase. So Kent about connecting.
fragments,” Forster added: the perfect Wildlife Trust has been working with
motto for bees, toads and water voles, local councils to establish the right sort of There’s another crucial move:
and just as good for our own relationship connecting the present with the future.
with nature. Just as more and better We need bees. It’s no good making a series of lovely
connections make human lives better, so They are essential bee roads if you leave them to fend
we need exactly the same things to keep for a wild and for themselves. Soon they will become
the wild world wild. living countryside. overgrown and lose the very thing that
bees love them for. There’s no point to
It’s a problem that’s been sneaking conditions by encouraging wild flowers to the scheme unless it has a long-term
up on us for years. We can visit a nature regenerate naturally. The scheme already legacy: and that is achieved by training
reserve, but when it’s surrounded by manages 11.5 hectares and hopes to add local volunteers to monitor and look after
houses, roads and industrialised farming, more sites. This involves another kind sections of the bee roads. After that we
it’s an island – lovely but doomed. We of connectivity: connecting wildlife and must look for further connections.
have allowed the human world to take conservation organisations with people.
over our countryside. “Small actions can make a big
Many roadsides are managed by difference,” says the Trust’s Rosie
But we can fight back – by joining up intensive mowing. We have somehow Earwaker. “We need people to be aware
the good places, by softening and freeing developed the idea that the ideal green of that. What you do in your garden
our landscape, and by allowing wild places space looks like the fairway on a golf matters.” Kent Wildlife Trust has started
and wild things to connect. course: which is like saying that the ideal awards for the best gardens for bees and
living room is an airport lounge. We’ve an for other wildlife. So they’re joining up
Protecting pollinators unfortunate mania for tidiness, forgetting people and bees.
that we call an untidy house ‘lived-in’.
We have grown rightly worried about Bees are part of our lives. We need
the decline of the insects that pollinate If we want a countryside that’s lived in them; many of our crops depend on them.
plants. Pollinators provide every third by bees, toads, water voles and everything They are essential for a wild and living
mouthful of food we eat; without them, else, we must persuade people to accept countryside. So we need to make a mental
the countryside will die. But bees are adjustment and see them in a different
not great travellers: they prefer to potter light: creatures that we must connect
from flower to flower. What they need is with, and whose connections we need to
connectivity. cherish and enlarge.
Wildlife news / August 2019 13
