Thursday 4 July 2019

Life in the Meadow

Hay is an important crop to us: we use it to feed our cattle in winter and we sell some as well.

Male common blue butterfly.
If you think it's just a matter of cutting the grass and then bailing it, think again. Hay must not contain nasty plants that are harmful to livestock so we have to be sure that no plants like ragwort go into the bales. That means weeding the meadow every year before the cut. If the hay crop is trampled by visitors or flattened by hail, it can be a dead loss. If we cut it and then have a week of rain, the hay will be too wet to use and will go mouldy even if we bail it. Then there are mechanical problems to deal with as the machinery sits idle for most of the year and has a habit of breaking down on it's first outing. Finally there is the problem of staffing. Making hay takes several days and gathering it in needs at least two people, preferably more to drive the tractors and load the trailers, then unload them at the barn. Backbreaking work, I can tell you.
Knapweed and lady's bedstraw.
"Make hay while the sun shines" is the old proverb. So when is the best time to make hay? While the grass is often at its best in June, we like to go late with our hay making in order to give our insect life a good chance to get airborne and to let the later flowering plants set seed. However, if we wait too long, the grasses turn to brown and lose most of the nutrition we want.

Black-tailed skimmer female.
In early July we look for all the signs that tell us our crop is ripe. The grasses are going to seed and just turning from green to brown; the pods of the yellow rattle flowers have dried out and rattle pleasingly when we shake them; the seeds of the buttercups have turned black. And that is where we are now. It's hay-time.

Female hover-fly.

Two views of a spectacular large pied hover-fly.
We should love them as their larvae prey on wasps.
Today I took a last look at our meadow before the cut takes place. It is full of life and there are more flowers than I ever remember before. That's because making hay in the old fashioned way mixes up the seeds of all the plants in the meadow and spreads them around, so that plants that grow only in the edges of the field start to appear in the middle, and vice-verse.

Large skipper
Every year seems to benefit a different group of flowers. This year all of the vegetation is exceptionally tall but the plants I notice most at the bedstraws. As I entered the meadow near the visitor centre I could not help but notice a sweet, honeyed scent on the wind. I tracked it down to a dense belt of tall, yellow lady's bedstraw that was not there last year.  In farm and cottage kitchens it used to be used to help set jams and jellies, but all the bedstraws were used, when dried, as bedding to fill pillows and mattresses. When they are dried, the scent really come out. My favourite bedstraw to hang in the airing cupboard and put into drawers of clothes is woodruff. It hardly has any scent until you dry it. I also tried mixing it with tobacco and smoking it in a pipe, but I was young and foolish then. The other common bedstraw is hedge bedstraw, which is white and dominates much of the roadside this year, especially around the M25.

All of these wonderful plants are about to be cut down and made into hay, which seems like vandalism of a sort. To minimise the effect, we cut from the centre outwards so that wildlife refugees like voles, hares and even insects can escape to the margins, rather than be herded into the centre of the field where the final cut will kill them all. We also leave a boundary of tall vegetation for them to hide in and a bigger uncut swathe to act as a sanctuary. This tallest vegetation will be left to be grazed down by cows in the winter.

Speckled wood butterfly.
In today's meadow safari I was particularly searching for wasp spiders, dragonflies and butterflies. I have trouble hearing crickets and grasshoppers at my age (thank-you Jimi Hendrix!) but every footfall scattered dozens of them. It was a hot, still afternoon so not the best time to look but here is what I saw.

Stubby common darter dragonflies are all over the site at the moment, often well away from water. The big bullies of the dragonfly world are the most mobile, audibly snapping up hover-flies and even taking butterflies on the wing. The one with brown wings is a brown hawker and the big, bright blue one is appropriately named "The Emperor." Blue damselflies outnumber the dragonflies 1000:1 but they are much harder to spot and identify.

Meadows and butterflies go together like they were made for each other, which they are in a way. As we humans cleared large areas of forest to make pastures and fields, the sun-loving butterflies proliferated. Our meadow at Paxton has common blue, brown argus, small copper, small skipper, Essex skipper, large skipper, meadow brown and ringlet butterflies in it at the moment. Around the edges, on bramble and rose, we can find red admirals, commas, gatekeepers, speckled woods and at least two kinds of white butterfly. This week we have an influx of spectacular, but often well-worn, painted lady butterflies from the south. 
Painted lady.

If you would like to know more about all of these creatures, join us on July 18th for a talk and walk titled  Horse Stingers and Soul Bearers of Paxton Pits with John McDonough. The details are on our new website https://paxton-pits.org.uk/