CASE STUDY: BIOBLITZ IN ABERGAVENNY
I have a lockdown-crazed 10-year-old son and a modest garden in Monmouthshire – the combined area of front and back gardens is about 25m by 5m. Most is lawn though there is a pond, veg patch, hedges and flower-filled borders where all flowers have to justify their existence based on their pollinator-attracting powers.
My son Owen was a bit sceptical about what we would find in such a small and well-trodden space. So for our bioblitz, I decided to start with the lucky dip of the pond. We dug this in 2019 and it looked pretty dead back in January but it is now extraordinarily rich in life and a dependable place to find monsters. We counted three snail species, Daphnia (water fleas), shrimps, waterlice, damselfly larvae, hornwort and pond skaters. I don’t think we can count the introduced toad tadpoles or the small shoal of baby chub we rescued from a local ditch (see July issue).
The pond dipping was all a bit taxing so we lay in the hammock counting bees and butterflies for an hour. We had four species of the latter: small white, peacock, small tortoiseshell and a holly blue. The bees thronging on salvia and wisteria were harder and we had to take photos and then try to identify them. As for flies… We did, however, find a very smart wasp beetle and a hawthorn shield bug. The compost bin provided another reliable source of worms, woodlice, beetles and slugs. Fortunately, Owen created his own illustrated Beastopedia to record some of the species and it’s a delightful and very personal reference book.
We spent about an hour watching the birds coming and going – mostly feeding their young. We have a colony of sparrows in the eaves, jackdaws in the chimney, a woodpigeon nesting in the front hedge and blackbirds in the wisteria. Sadly, the collared doves that had made a flimsy nest in a vine were plundered by magpies so we couldn’t count them. While we watched, a rat sneaked out to pinch some seed from the birdfeeders and swifts screamed overhead. I’m not sure whether fly-bys count but we recorded them anyway. Our only other mammals were unidentified bats at dusk. Too big for pipistrelles, I thought.
And finally, our wild plants were pretty thin on the ground but we did identify a native foxglove, wood avens and some hawkweeds in the overgrown lawn.
We didn’t spend the full 24 hours bioblitzing and I’m not sure all of our records are sound but we loved the safari and the thrill of the chase. And Owen is taking a much closer look at wild creatures than ever before, which is a huge bonus.