Val Bourne: I’ll explain how to help insects find their paths, says Val
Val explains how we can help provide ‘insect pathways’
AFEW years ago I had to interview an Oxford professor about the origin of apple trees. DNA evidence had confirmed that apple trees were not British natives, as was first thought. He and others had proved conclusively that they were descended from fruit trees found in the Tian Shan forests of Central Asia.
The interview took place on one of those summer days pregnant with the possibility of rain so, after we’d finished, the aforesaid professor said he would run me to my bus station on the outskirts of Oxford. It was already sheeting down as we began zigzagging through the streets that were still largely inhabited by university academics and straight out of an Inspector Morse set.
Suddenly my unlikely chauffeur remembered that he had a meeting and evicted me from the car there and then. I was left to navigate the roads and finally emerged, like a drowned rat, at the correct roundabout. I could see the car park, but I couldn’t reach it because there were waist-high barriers stopping people crossing the road.
As a lady of advanced years, I had to shin over the barriers and then walk several hundred yards up a narrow strip of grass while three lanes of traffic roared past and splashed me! By the time I got back to my car my mood was as dark as the weather!
That sort of difficulty, getting from
A to B, is encountered by wildlife all the time. Isolated patches are surrounded by impenetrable boundaries that wildlife can’t cross. We know that pinning wildlife into one area reduces the numbers. The food either runs out, or it isn’t available because the natural world is dynamic and affected by constant change.
Buglife ( buglife.org.uk), the charity for invertebrates, states that 40-70% of species could become extinct if action is not taken to enable these animals to move through the landscape. So it has come up with a way of helping by opening up B-lines, or insect pathways, and this is something gardeners can help with.
Most gardeners have a verge and, these days, it’s far better to try to grow insect-friendly flowers rather than mow it every week. My own verges sustain lots of insects from March onwards, when the wild daffodils flower. After they finish there are cowslips, meadow cranesbill, crosswort, bird’s-foot trefoil and lady’s bedstraw. The flowers encourage butterflies, bees and lots of tiny insects.
The problem is that the rest of the verges in my village are still mowed once a week, so my patch doesn’t join up with other areas. Mown grass may please tidy-minded gardeners, but these desert strips won’t allow your grandchildren to admire wildflowers, beautiful butterflies or birdsong. The idea behind B-Lines is to create pathways, minus any barriers, because it’s vital.
However, the biggest barriers are inside people’s heads. They’re still behaving as if wildlife is in a good place. Perhaps some people haven’t realised that the natural world is changing for the worse, having plummeted into decline. In the mid-1990s I would have to chip insects off my windscreen in summer on a weekly basis. That doesn’t happen now, so it’s time to step up to the task in hand and restore wildlife. We should all do our bit for, as my granddaughter’s T-shirt says, ‘There is no Planet B’. This is it!
Now that 97% of wildflower meadows have disappeared under the plough since the 1930s, there’s little nectar and pollen and few nesting sites for wild bees and other invertebrates. These days the wildflowers near me cling to areas that the plough couldn’t reach, often steep valley sides. It’s time for some joined-up thinking as well as joined-up B-lines. Visit Buglife to see projects in your area.
“There is no Planet B: this is it!”