Living Landscapes
Get Cumbria buzzing
Project manager Tanya St Pierre reveals plans for an exciting new project to boost
bees and other pollinating insects in northwest Cumbria.
Between March and May, bumblebee queens are a familiar sight foraging on spring flowers. Aſter spending the winter hibernating, they are building up vital energy stores before laying their eggs and raising the next generation of bumblebees.
Sadly, every year that passes sees a reduction in the wildlife that makes spring so special; this includes our pollinating insects. Britain is home to an amazing variety of wild pollinators: bumblebees, hoverflies, solitary bees, flies, buterflies and moths to name a few. However, over three-quarters of these are in decline, with 250 species at significant risk of extinction due to habitat loss as a result of agricultural intensification and increased urbanisation of towns and villages. The construction and expansion of major roads has also resulted in flower-rich areas being broken up into smaller patches, isolating and spliting pollinator populations in half, and increasing the likelihood of localised extinction of many of our less mobile insect species.
28 Cumbrian Wildlife | May 2019
We want to turn around the fortune of our wild pollinators and have spent the last six months developing a £1.6 million project, funded by National Lotery Heritage Fund and Highways England, to provide an unbroken supply of pollen and nectar-rich forage along the road network in northwest Cumbria. As many pollinators only travel 1–2km from their nest site, connecting habitats is critical to enable healthy populations to flourish.
Since the 1930s Britain has lost 97% of flower-rich grassland and 50% of its hedgerows. Much of our remaining flower-rich habitat is seriously fragmented or degraded.
B-Lines
Invertebrates charity Buglife has researched and mapped a series of ‘best fit’ pathways that run through our towns and countryside and have the potential to link fragmented habitats. The project will aim to connect these pollinator pathways, known as B-Lines, to provide a continuous corridor of flower-rich habitat so pollinators (and other wildlife) can travel through the landscape.
This project will seek to revive and connect areas of flower-rich grassland to provide a lifeline for our struggling
pollinators. Photo: Jon Hawkins – Surrey Hills Photography
To make a difference we need change at a landscape scale, so we are working in partnership with Allerdale and Copeland Councils, Solway AONB and the National Trust along the B-Lines to restore and create high-quality habitats in green and brown spaces, such as parks, recreational areas, nature reserves, and around housing estates. Work will involve a range of actions, including changes to grass-cuting regimes, plug or seed planting, orchard creation, and scrub clearance. We’ve already identified 27 community sites, equalling a total of 80 hectares.
We’re also working closely with Highways England along parts of the A595 and A66. Different plants, insects and animals require different ecological conditions, so sites with a diversity of open areas, scrub and woodland will support a greater number of species. Therefore, besides bringing sites back into sensitive management to enable existing wild flowers to flourish, we’ll also be using innovative techniques to create sunny glades, flowering lawns, species-rich grassland and mosaic habitats to provide overwintering and nesting areas.
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