LIVE24SEVEN // Gwent Wildlife Trust
Reports of ‘lemurs’ on Gwent Levels!
“I didn’t know we had lemurs in Wales!” has been a common reaction to my introduction as Gwent Wildlife Trust’s new LEMUR+ Trainee, but don’t worry, GWT aren’t attempting to establish a mini-Madagascar in rainy Wales. LEMUR+, short for ‘Learning Environments: Marine, Urban & Rural + technology’, is an exciting Heritage Lottery Funded project, offering twelve enthusiastic individuals the opportunity to gain hands-on, practical experience in nature conservation and heritage interpretation with a range of host organisations.
As an ecological surveys trainee, my placement focuses on developing skills in a wide range of ecological surveys and in the space of just five months, I’ve had so many invaluable experiences and learnt so much about GWT’s important work. Building skills in plant identification has been a key aim of the traineeship, and so I and one other LEMUR+ trainee, Gareth, jumped at the opportunity to survey orchids at one of GWT’s reserves – Great Traston Meadows on the Gwent Levels.
Great Traston Meadows, part of a Site of Special Scientific Interest, is an impressive mosaic of grassland and grazing marsh. As with much of the Gwent Levels, the landscape is criss-crossed by a series of ‘grips’ and ‘reens’ – ancient drainage systems. This unique habitat supports an impressive diversity of plants, including marsh bedstraw, lesser spearwort, meadow vetchling, and water-loving rushes and sedges, as well as scarcer plants such as grass vetchling and southern marsh orchid. In turn, a wide array of animals has been recorded at the site – grass snake, birds such as reed bunting and willow warbler, and a variety of insects, including one of the UK’s rarest bumblebees, the shrill carder-bee.
Andy Karran
Gwent Wildlife Trust’s LEMUR+ trainee, Lowri Watkins, explodes some myths about her role!
Lee Parsons
The eye-catching southern marsh orchid (Dactylorhiza praetermissa), sometimes referred to as ‘Meadow Rocket’, as the flowering spikes appear to shoot up in spring, favour damp, marshy ground in the south of Britain. Growing to up to 70cm in height, it terminates in a spike of more than one hundred deep purple-pink flowers, delicately patterned with dots and dashes. Many orchid species have experienced decline throughout Britain as a result of land development and widespread drainage and so we are keen to see this species flourish in the Gwent Levels.
In the spring of 2011, a needle-in-a-haystack hunt of the reserve by volunteer surveyors turned up a population of approximately 150 southern marsh orchids and a handful more of common spotted orchids or the recently recognised southern marsh orchid variety, known as ‘leopard orchid’. In the intervening years, the reserve has been carefully managed with a combination of annual hay cuts and aftermath grazing, to enhance the habitat and encourage wildflowers. It was hoped that this management would have benefitted the small southern marsh orchid population and so by 2016, it was high time we took stock of numbers.
Ray Armstrong
Pulling on our wellies and with horsefly-swatting arms at the ready, we began our search on a sunny spring day, traversing each field in turn, scanning carefully from left-to-right in the hope of spotting the bright pink flash of a flowering spike. After a few excited points at what turned out to be tufted vetch flowers, we finally sighted our first orchids just a few metres in, standing resplendently among the tall grasses. From then on, it seemed like the orchids were multiplying by the second and sprouting every few footsteps out of nowhere. By the end of the first field, we had already counted as many orchids as the previous survey had recorded across the whole reserve!
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