Conservation & Ecology
The population of the once common Small Copper has declined by 90%
encourage golf course managers to take the wider countryside into account. Golf courses can be highly inhospitable to wildlife, both in the way they are designed and the way in which they are managed. However, this can be ameliorated greatly by taking into account the surrounding landscape: for example Rushmore Golf Club, on the Dorset/Wiltshire border, retained a parkland/wood pasture landscape when they converted parkland and farmland into a course. I wish they were more tolerant of deadwood in the trees, but they do have dead hulks on the ground.” “Another very well known location for international competitions in Surrey wanted to put up owl boxes for barn owls, but were not prepared to provide rough grassland habitat for foraging (barn owls need to hunt for small rodents in long undisturbed grassland). Therefore, they got no barn owls, but some tawny owls and lots of squirrels in the boxes.” Lanhydrock Golf Course in Cornwall
is surrounded by good red deer habitat. Red deer come onto the course in the autumn, leaving deep hoof prints in the greens into which small white balls drop. Clearly this is not acceptable on the greens - but as the UK deer population is
Case Study 1
Royal Cinque Ports Royal Cinque Ports Golf Course, near Deal in Kent, has a Higher Land Stewardship agreement with Natural England, and maintenance of native roughs is a major part of the work they undertake.
The entire area covered by the course has SSSI status. The native species include fescues, bents, meadow grasses and Crested Dogstail, although ryegrass and Yorkshire Fog have crept in and gained a good foothold in places. Some of the low lying, damp areas contain wild Orchids which have seen their habitat shrinking due to invasion by buckthorn, brambles and nettles etc. These dune slacks will be cleared of undesirable species and then scraped with the digger bucket back down to water table level to encourage the native species back.
52 PC APRIL/MAY 2013
In the south of England, the Brown Argus has started to feed on cultivated Geranium
burgeoning at present, can we think of constructive way to encourage them to stay in the woodland and roughs? Courses should be providing linkages and nodes of habitat so that they increase the ecological connectivity of the landscape.
The design and treatment of habitats should be sensitive to the surrounding area and take into account species that will use the course. Pest control needs to be designed in, not applied later. John Dobson of Make Natural Ltd. Ecological Services adds; “I have conducted ecological surveys on innumerable ‘green spaces’, including many golf courses where I have witnessed a number of examples of site management where it has struck me that there might be some room for ecological improvement.
It has been a tendency for some years for golf courses to remove roughs in order to ‘speed up the game’. This means, in practice, encouraging a greater throughput of golfers, leading to a subsequent increase in club revenues. That might be a particularly difficult trend to reverse, and the demand for the inclusion of significant roughs in a course would, I think, have to come from
In the past, the roughs were grazed or burnt to control coarse grass species but, in more recent years, they have been largely neglected. Many areas were mown, but the clippings were left to rot down, allowing the invasion of many undesirable grass types and weeds. The nutrition levels are well above what would be expected for native dune grassland.
The club has now embarked on a programme of renovation in the long rough areas for the benefit of wildlife and members alike.
The inclusion of a Weidenmann Super 500 flail collector in their fleet of machinery has enabled them to begin sward refinement by mowing and collecting the clippings. Since acquiring the machine a few months ago, the greenkeeping team have cleaned out around seven hectares of native rough, working through a prioritised list of areas as part of their winter
A Meadow Brown sharing a thistle with a Honey Bee
golfers themselves. I am not a golfer but, if I was, I imagine that I might regard the rough as an integral part of the game, along with sand-traps, ditches and trees.
Where they are present, roughs offer significant opportunities for habitat creation and enhancements. In the ecologically better examples, long-term rotational cutting is already practised. This leads, on the one hand, to various degrees of roughs, from ‘tiger roughs’ (where the grass is long enough to conceal a tiger; a circumstance uncommon in the UK) to light roughs. On the other hand, this practice can give rise to structural mosaics of grassland habitats of different heights, which may additionally include areas left uncut over winter. Such structural mosaics may support diverse and valuable invertebrate communities, regardless of whether they are botanically unremarkable. In some cases, the only significant
areas of rough grassland are those left growing around the bases of larger trees growing in the open. Obviously, it would be ecologically beneficial to extend and enhance this practice. A striking example of ecologically poor practice I have witnessed on a number of occasions results from cutting grass and
programme.
Any areas where a loss of grass cover has taken place, through machine scalping or die-back, will have fescue seed broadcast over the top and then the area will be worked with grass harrows as growing conditions improve. The plan is to do more areas but, coming into spring, activity in the roughs will be reduced to allow ground nesting birds to settle and avoid disturbing insects.
As this is the first year the club are undertaking serious work, it is hoped that the upcoming season will show some progress in the maintained areas. It will be several years until the sward has the qualities they are aiming for and the future may well see trials of the herbicide Rescue to further improve species content by further reducing populations of pasture grasses.
The club is fortunate enough to have an area of natural Marram coverage within
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156