Here, better late than never, is my review of this event earlier in the month.
According to the flyer which advertised the event, it was
part of the: “BBC Summer of Wildlife”. Nevertheless, the small print on the
flyer informed us that it was: “... not being organised or run by the BBC”. The
BBC link appeared to consist of an opportunity to: “Meet Naomi Wilkinson from
CBBC’s Wild!” Unfortunately, I seem to have missed that opportunity (drat!).
The actual organisers were Manchester City Council in collaboration
with Red Rose Forest, Manchester Museum, the University of Manchester, the
Environment Agency and Greater Manchester Local Records Centre.
My main involvement was with the latter organisation - which
is in the midst of an important 3 year project called ‘Grey to Green’ (http://www.gmwildlife.org.uk/grey_to_green/).
The aim of this Heritage Lottery funded project is to: “... encourage and train local people to identify and record wildlife.
The project operates across the whole of Greater Manchester with a particular
focus upon residents in Tameside, Manchester, Salford and Wigan.” The Grey to
Green team has been running ‘bioblitzes’ at various wildlife rich sites,
throughout this region, all year. A ‘bioblitz’ is an event at which a group of
naturalists attempts to identify as much of a particular site’s wildlife, as
possible, in an approximately 24 hour period. This particular Heaton Park bioblitz
was incorporated into the main ‘Festival of Nature’ event. It actually started
the evening before when bats, moths and other nocturnal wildlife were detected
and recorded. Other groups of plants and animals were recorded on the day of
the main event. My contribution was to work with other botanical enthusiasts to
record the site’s flowering plants and ferns. I’ve been involved with this
project all year and it’s given me the opportunity to investigate and record
samples of Greater Manchester’s wild vegetation from Prestwich to Wilmslow and
from Wigan to Broadbottom. Even prior to any significant analysis of the data,
I think that it may be possible to draw a few very tentative conclusions (at
least about the plant life) – but more on that later.
The main festival event itself was, as these things usually
are, a bit of a mixed bag. I confess that I didn’t get round to visiting many
of the stalls that were present because I spent a lot of my time in the field.
Nevertheless, I did get to speak to two ladies on the Environment Agency stall
who wanted to hear people’s views on their organisation’s management of local
rivers and river valleys. As it happens,
a number of wildlife groups in the Mersey Valley had discussions with the EA
last year (2012) about their management of the river banks. The EA were
prepared to enter into dialogue and this is currently leading to some very
positive outcomes for the Mersey Valley’s biodiversity. I learned from the two
ladies at the festival that the EA are now actively soliciting comments on the
issues facing local river basins through a consultation. You can find out more
on the consultation website at: www.environment-agency.gov.uk/challengesandchoices
. If you have any opinions on this subject, please contribute to the
consultation – I certainly will be.
I also had an interesting chat with a postgraduate student
from the University of Manchester who is in the process of completing a PhD on
freshwater algae; he had some nifty little microscopes with screen displays –
so that I could see what the microscopic plants, that he was studying, looked
like.
There seemed to be a lot of silly, vaguely wildlife-related,
things for little kids to do. Children, with whiskers painted on their cheeks,
and wearing sparkly cardboard ‘bunny ears’ rushed around stroking stuffed foxes
and badgers and viewing various hapless living creatures in a variety of tanks
and cages. I am, of course, a bit of a
curmudgeonly old git – but even I don’t disapprove of little kids doing silly
things and having fun on a Saturday afternoon! Nevertheless, these silly things
are supposed to fill them with enthusiasm for wildlife. Do they? I wonder if
the council has ever checked? To my knowledge, the Council has been running
these types of events for around a generation now. I wonder how many little
kids, who were persuaded to construct and wear sparkly bunny ears 20 years ago,
are now enthusiastic and knowledgeable naturalists? I hope that my scepticism
is unfounded. If you are an enthusiastic and knowledgeable naturalist, and were
inspired to become one through making and wearing sparkly bunny ears 20 years
ago, please comment on this post and put me right!
One peculiar and unaccountable aspect of this festival was a
tent full of drummers (!) What their remorseless, monotonous, interminable
thumping had to do with wildlife, I will probably never know. For a while they
could be heard all over the park and I narrowly escaped being driven completely
mad. I briefly toyed with the idea of applying a penknife to all of the
percussive surfaces in the tent – mercifully, I came to my senses and realised
that I didn’t really want to go to prison for drumicide (there is, of course,
no such crime as “drumicide” – I made it up!).
The ‘star’ of the show was, of course, Heaton Park itself –
or rather it should have been. It is, I believe, the biggest park in
Manchester. Nevertheless, the bits that I saw were not very biodiverse and
maximising their biodiversity did not appear to have any sort of priority. As
far as I was able to tell there were three main types of habitat in the park:
lots of obsessively mown grass, some overgrown, gloomy tree plantations and
some unmanaged, scruffy bits. The dominant flora was a rather dismal assemblage
of (all too common) plants which, I’m afraid, I could have, more or less,
predicted before I laid eyes on it. I can recite species off the top off my
head: Common Nettle, Broad-leaved Dock, Creeping Buttercup, Meadow Buttercup,
Yorkshire Fog Grass, Timothy Grass, Soft Rush, Greater Plantain, Ribwort
Plantain etc., etc., etc. The ubiquity
of this assemblage, in so many sites in Greater Manchester, is, I fear, an
indicator of how species-poor our local biodiversity has become.
Significant populations of the two alien, vegetable thugs,
Himalayan Balsam and Japanese Knotweed, were evident in a number of places. It
is possible to control the former, if the will exists to do so, but controlling
the latter can be difficult and expensive.
The most interesting plant find of the day was also an
alien. It occurred on a little patch of disturbed ground in the midst of a sea
of closely mown grass. The plant in question turned out to be Cape-gooseberry (Physalis peruviana - see photo above). This species is
unrelated to gooseberries but is, in fact, a member of the tomato family. Its
fruits are like miniature yellow tomatoes and are edible. It’s originally from
South America but I believe that it’s now grown commercially for its fruits in
various parts of the world (e.g. South Africa). I’m not sure if it’s grown on
any significant commercial scale in the UK. This was only the second time that
I’ve seen this plant, in the wild, in Manchester. Curiously, I found my first
one, in Hulme, about a week before. I
looked it up in the ‘Bible’ i.e. Prof. Clive Stace’s monumental ‘New Flora of
the British Isles’ (3rd ed., 2010). I learned that it is:
“Intr[o]d[uced]-nat[uralise]d; imported as minor fruit and casual on tips, nat[uralised]d
in Herts; occasional in Br[itain], mainly S[outh] ...”
So do my two finds suggest that it’s moving north? Some
authorities believe that some alien plants, will respond to climate change by
doing so in the near future. Well, no - to advance such a hypothesis, on the
basis of two finds, would be ridiculous! But ask me again in a few years time.
I learned on the grapevine that this event had cost the
Council around £10,000. I rather wish that they’d spent the money on improving
the park for wildlife.
Dave Bishop, September, 2013
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