Worcestershire Record No. 18 April 2005 pp. 26-27

John Partridge

In his article John Meiklejohn has written about the methods we use and the results that he has obtained from tussocking – cutting off grass tussocks and taking them home for sorting.

I want to emphasise two lessons that I think can be learned from this exercise – rough grass is valuable habitat, and small areas of it have value.

Whilst this is by no means a scientific analysis, we now have collected enough samples to show the richness of this habitat, although, of course, it does vary, but I have also noticed how many of our road verges are cut low each winter, far beyond the need for traffic sight-lines, I suspect just because it can be done and it looks tidier. We are beginning to learn the lesson about leaving dead wood, both standing and fallen; do we now need to learn a lesson about other forms of ‘untidy’ area?

The other lesson that can be learned is that small patches are valuable. The richest source that I have found so far, in the north of the county, was a neglected triangle in the corner of an arable field. A public footpath effectively cut it off from the main field, leaving a triangle perhaps 30 m along each side – this yielded 21 species of beetle, and other inverts as well – see the list at the end. Other rich sites have been small patches of land near streams, often separated from the fields by a fence or hedge, and they were even smaller.

The invertebrates that we are finding in these sites are going to be at the bottom of the food chain, but they will provide food for birds during the winter. These sites are also home for over-wintering larvae, and adults of some species of ladybirds and shield-bugs which will breed in the spring; they are a reservoir which can feed the summer insects into other areas.

We must think before we tidy-up.

A species List from two handfuls of grass from the north of the county: