SNS CONFERENCE 2011 – LIVING LANDSCAPES

CONFERENCE 2011 LINKING LANDSCAPES

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SNS CONFERENCE 2011 – LIVING LANDSCAPES Dr Bob Stebbings, President: Suffolk Naturalists’ Society Through my life I have lived through enormous changes in landscapes. During the 1950s, a quarter of a million kilometres of hedgerows were grubbed out, including all the hedgerow trees on farmland. Then, in East Anglia particularly, we had the march of the grey squirrel from further south across to the north Norfolk coast in only a few years. Followed by the demise of our own red squirrel. Subsequently, in the late 1960s and through the early 70s, we lost all our lovely elm trees which were such a huge visual delight in East Anglia. All these changes have resulted in fragmentation of the countryside. Now we have tiny patches of what one might call wildlife habitat linked by fields whose hedgerows are maintained in a way quite alien to the ways in which they used to be managed in the 1950s. I remember farm workers spending a day doing 20 or 30 yards of ditch and hedgerow, work that would take all winter. Now, a machine goes along and cuts the same length of hedgerow in a few minutes.

Also in the 1950s, fields which were much smaller then, always had dead corners. There would be old straw and hay stacks and bits of old rusty farm machinery just lying around in these corners. You don’t see that these days, that’s all gone. So the little strips of hedgerows that we now see are not really very good for most wildlife. The size of woodlands and copses has decreased such that many bird species can’t now maintain themselves in the small patches that are left. If you compare maps of the 1930s with maps of today, you see that one of the big losses has been riparian pasture. Instead of the wet pastures that cattle used to graze in the past, we have cereal crops at the edges of rivers and drains. So there have been huge changes in our landscape just in the last 50 or 60 years.

Of course these are only part of the changes which have been taking place since the last glaciation. The landscape has always been changing. But, since set aside, when some farmers were very inventive in the way they used it to increase wildlife on their farms, and now with the various farm payments that are available, much more attention is being paid to trying to link together all the diverse habitats that are little patches, and trying to link them together to make them into something much more valuable.

Joan Hardingham, Chair: Suffolk Naturalists’ Society There are a lot of ‘thank you’s for an effort like this.

First of all thank you to all the speakers and the chairmen of the sessions, Dr Bob Stebbings and Julian Roughton, for agreeing to take part, Rachel Woodmansee and her team at the Seckford Theatre who helped set it all up, all the organisations who have provided stalls and displays in the foyer, for their support. We couldn’t have done it without a great deal of organisation from council members, and particularly Dr Rasik Bhadresa who has masterminded it all and has made it go so smoothly, to whom we are very grateful.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 48

Introduction to the Morning Session Julian Roughton, Chair Chief Executive Officer, Suffolk Wildlife Trust It was 25 years ago that I got my first job in nature conservation and that was in the Brecklands. I well remember going out to one of the sites that I was responsible for, the Breckland Artemisia Reserve. Here was this quarter acre plot, road on one side, warehousing and industrial estate on the other three, with the largest remaining population of Field wormwood left in the UK. And this was the remnant of the inland sand dune that in 1668 had overwhelmed Santon Downham? and blocked the Little Ouse so enormous was it. Looking at this little patch of land I did think ‘gosh is conservation come to this that we are looking after these little places, these little remnants at the corner of industrial estates?’. It seemed rather a sad end, that this place had lost its economic context, its landscape context and indeed its cultural context.

My views on that have changed. Yes, it was a little zoo, a zoo for this plant, but actually it turned out that this zoo was also the best place in the country for the wormwood moonshiner beetle, because it only survived on the seeds of this plant. In the 1980s it seemed that these were the only places we were going to be left with. Now we look back on these places and think ‘no, actually these are the reservoirs that hold the species that once remained.’ These are the places from which we can bring them back out, into the wider landscape. That is the theme of this conference, and that’s the theme of the whole approach of landscape conservation.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)