Warzone wildlife
ARMY RANGES ON SALISBURY PLAIN ARE ENGLAND’S GREATEST HIDDEN WILDERNESS, AWASH WITH RARE SPECIES. BEN HOARE SEES A VISION OF OUR WILDLIFE-RICH PAST.
At Salisbury Plain wildlife flourishes amongst the tank tracks
B rambles curl around the battered hulk of a wrecked tank, reclaiming it for nature. Its rusting caterpillar tracks are almost hidden in a sea of yellowing grasses and flowers reaching to the horizon in every direction. There’s swathes of wild carrot, wild parsnip, greater knapweed, dyer’s greenweed, lady’s bedstraw, meadow cranesbill, viper’s bugloss, weld, devil’s-bit scabious. Under a hot July sun, the gently rolling landscape thrums with countless grasshoppers and bees. Overhead, skylarks sing and linnets twitter non-stop. Yellowhammer song comes from distant hawthorn scrub. A corn bunting jangles away.
But something is noticeable by its absence. Modern life. There is no traffic noise, no tractors working in fields, not even the sound of passing trains. Also missing are pylons, mobile-phone masts, solar-panel arrays, wind turbines and all the other paraphernalia of our 21st-century countryside. If it weren’t for the decaying military hardware, this idyllic scene could pass for a sleepy backwater in rural France – ‘La France profonde’. Yet this is definitely England.
The Ministry of Defence Salisbury Plain Training Area (SPTA) is a place everyone has heard of but relatively few, other than those in uniform, get to explore properly. “Nowhere else in the country looks quite like it any more – and that’s the point,” enthuses MoD ecologist Julie Swain. “This is one of the largest wildernesses we have left in the densely populated, intensively farmed lowland south. It’s becoming a stronghold for more and more species.”
WELCOME TO THE DANGER ZONE
Julie is my guide for the day, together with Tom Theed of Landmarc, the company that manages the MoD’s 190,000-hectare estate across Britain. We’re chaperoned by Major Andy Riddell and Senior Training Safety Officer WO1 Les French, who have picked a date when there are no big exercises, though we see some camouflaged Land Rovers tear past and a Chinook helicopter judders over.
Much of central Wiltshire to the north of Stonehenge is taken up by the SPTA, which is roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. It has its origins in army land purchases dating back to 1897, during the South African wars of independence. Wiltshire was chosen partly because it was then among the poorest English counties; land was cheap.
Look at Ordnance Survey Landranger map 184 and, aside from the Devizes–Salisbury and Marlborough–Salisbury A roads, you’ll see it as a huge stretch of white nothingness. The most frequent label, in pink capitals, is “Danger Zone”.
A million man-training days are carried out here each year, a figure set to
increase when the last British Army units return to the UK from Germany in 2019.
Instead of the usual patchwork of villages and farms, the map shows a single community of note on MoD land. But it’s an eerie ghost village. In 1943, Imber was evacuated to make way for military wargaming; bats, badgers and swallows are its only inhabitants today. Imber was the last in a long line of human settlements within what we now know as the SPTA, which is riddled with prehistoric earthworks, barrows and hill forts, some 6,000 years old.
Enforced depopulation means most of the area has gone unploughed and unfenced for over seven decades, and – uniquely for an English landscape of this size – has never known industrial fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides. While the post-war drive to boost food production transformed vast tracts of the UK, this portion of Salisbury Plain remained frozen in time. “So it’s simply phenomenal for wildflowers and invertebrates,” says Matt Shardlow, CEO of Buglife.
Here, at least, military objectives trumped the need to feed a nation. As entomologist Dave Goulson wryly observes in his 2017 book Bee Quest, “the Kaiser and Hitler perhaps deserve some grudging acknowledgement, for their actions unwittingly led to the creation of one of the largest nature reserves in Europe.” Conservationists like Goulson and Shardlow have three excellent reasons to rave about the MoD training area: species diversity, abundance and connectivity. When so much of Britain’s land is fragmented, leaving isolated pockets of good-quality habitat as nature reserves, here there is an embarrassment of riches.
BUILT ON CHALK
Salisbury Plain is an undulating dry chalk plateau, seldom above 200m, built from the remains of countless tiny marine creatures deposited millions of years ago on the bed of an ancient ocean. Today, much of it is prairie-style farmland producing wheat and crops such as oilseed rape, mostly devoid of tree cover. Within the MoD zone, however, patches of scrub and woodland are scattered here and there, while valleys are left to get wetter, especially in winter, and so support distinct plant communities.
The jewel in the crown is the SPTA’s 14,000 hectares of biodiverse chalk grassland, the biggest continuous expanse in north-west Europe. This is where most of the rare flora and fauna is to be found: breeding birds such as stone curlew and quail, marsh fritillary butterflies, unusual beetles, an array of threatened bumblebees and moths, numerous now-scarce chalk-loving wildflowers. In all, 67 nationally rare or scarce invertebrates occur. For a species like the solitary bee Melitta dimidiata that depends on a plant called sainfoin, this is virtually their only site in the country.
Several pairs of extremely rare Montagu’s harriers spend the summer on Salisbury Plain, preferring to nest in tall
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN IS 14,000 HECTARES OF VERY BIODIVERSE CHALK GRASSLAND.
crops but using the MoD’s neighbouring grassland to hunt. By the end of last year five individuals had been satellite-tagged by the Wiltshire Ornithological Society. “One male was called John, so inevitably he’s become Monty John,” laughs Julie.
“These days you only expect to find chalk grassland this rich on the steepest bits of downland that have escaped the plough,” Julie continues. “That’s what makes what we have here so special. The sheer scale and variety is unbelievable.” In one survey, ecologists caught no fewer than 158 species of beetle.
HAVEN FOR HARRIERS
Though it can be pretty bleak and windswept, the grassland is also important in winter, especially for hen harriers. These beleaguered raptors nest in our uplands but most move lower down after breeding. When ‘Nile’, a male satellite-tagged by the RSPB, turned up in 2016, he gifted ornithologists a unique opportunity to map where overwintering hen harriers forage and roost.
It’s not just about rarity, however. The military ranges provide an outpost for a number of once-common species rapidly losing ground in southern England. Take the whinchat. Though it is hardly rare, the only other significant southern population of this attractive summer migrant is now on Exmoor.
But it would be wrong to see the training area as a kind of Garden of Eden. Nor does it represent, as some commentators have suggested, an accidental form of rewilding. This is a semi-natural, actively managed landscape, just as it has always been. Ecologists at the MoD and Natural England, Landmarc staff and army top brass have to meet the needs of both wildlife and the military; the Government has to fulfil its obligations laid out in numerous official habitat and species directives. “Sometimes it’s a struggle to cater for everything,” admits Julie. Scrub encroachment is one of many tricky issues. Around 40 tenant farmers graze the SPTA, using temporary electric fencing to pen groups of 200 or so cattle into eight-acre areas, moved on rotation. “In an ideal world, grazing alone would control scrub,” says Landmarc’s Tom Theed. “But in practice, we also have to employ contractors. There’s a brilliant piece of military kit called the Armtrac, a tracked mine-clearance vehicle. It happens to be perfect for gorse bashing.” Yet scrub is a valuable habitat. Long-eared owls, which are thought to be declining in southern England, nest and roost in it. Two threatened butterflies use it too: the Duke of Burgundy favours a mixture of patchy scrub and sheltered grassy areas where its larval foodplant cowslip grows, while the brown hairstreak lays its eggs on blackthorn saplings. So removing all of the SPTA’s scrub is not an option. “As with many things in conservation, it’s about finding the right balance,” Julie says. What about disturbance? Surely combat vehicles end up squashing birds’ eggs? Julie explains that exercises are graded in terms of weight and ground impact, and officers liaise with her team to minimise the damage.
IN ONE SURVEY ECOLOGISTS CAUGHT NO FEWER THAN 158 SPECIES OF BEETLE.