My Favourite Place: Greater Manchester Mosses
Peat bogs are an incredible and ancient habitat. The vast majority of British lowland bogs started to form at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago and on average they accumulate just 1mm of peat annually. Bogs are also very carbon-rich, and although they only cover three per cent of the planet’s surface, they contain twice the carbon that’s held in the whole of the world’s forests!
The Greater Manchester Mosses used to be a single bog. It’s now a collection of fragments but it’s of enormous importance to wildlife. Peat’s very low in nutrients and the bogs are acidic so plants have evolved to persist in these very hostile environments and they show amazing adaptations – we have 13 types of carnivorous plant in Britain and they’re all associated with peat habitats.
Drosera anglica, the English sundew or great sundew, is the largest of the three sundew species in the UK, but it’s now found in less than 20 sites. I was involved in its reintroduction to the Manchester Mosses and back in the summer I revisited a site from 2019 and I was thrilled! The plants were in flower for the first time in 150 years and I counted 30 big seedlings.
We also reintroduced the fastest plant in the world: lesser bladderwort or Utricularia minor. It’s one of the most successful predators on the planet! It has these incredible bladder-like vacuum traps that take just one tenthousandth of a second to operate and engulf the prey swimming by.
The lesser bladderwort was virtually extinct. It had declined to a single puddle, but at the reintroduction site I was flabbergasted to see well over 30,000 individuals. It was amazing!
The bogs are dominated by moor grass and purple heather. As a child, I remember walking over the hills near Macclesfield with my grandfather; it’s a landscape that still speaks to me and it’s an incredible contrast to the surrounding agricultural desert. I’m blown away by them; I love my peat bogs!