Conservationists have a difficult job sometimes in deciding what habitat would be most advantageous in an area. After looking at signs from the past you also must weigh up how much work the restoration will be and then the question of money sets in – can we actually achieve this within our budgets?
With peatland covering just 3% of the Earth’s surface and being the greatest terrestrial carbon sink there is, restoring Hothfield Heathlands was thankfully an easy decision. There’s just 80 hectares of heathland left in Kent, with peatland taking up a small proportion of these heathland systems. The moisture retention in the soil and bogs makes the perfect habitat for carnivorous sundews, cotton grass, heath spotted orchids and bog asphodel. The exposed ground makes the perfect habitat for insects such as digger wasps and mining bees. And the large expanse of open ground makes the perfect habitat for reptiles who spend their summers basking in the sun.
The site is also a haven for birds. White throats, willow warblers and yellowhammers sing from the thickets of coconut-scented gorse, little egrets feed from the ground and snipes feed in the soft boggy ground. The bog is also home to the locally rare keeled skimmer dragonfly - the males vibrant blue abdomens can be seen darting past in the summer as they search for prey.
How do you keep a peatland, peatland?
Peatland only functions if it is allowed to stay wet. And this quality can be tricky to maintain when trees begin to grow nearby. Naturally, scrub will move in and then trees will take scrubs place, turning the land into secondary woodland and removing the moisture from the soil.
This is because trees act as water pumps, drawing in water through their roots and transpiring it through their leaves, expelling it from the ground and into the air. Even a small birch tree will pump out over 10,000 litres a year, drying out the peatland and destroying the habitat. Though trees are considered an excellent carbon sink themselves, they’re no match for peatland and so in this environment, we ideally want them out!
Most of the hard work removing trees and scrub is done by our grazing livestock who chomp young saplings before they have a chance to grow but one species that isn’t very tasty to livestock is birch. Birch is also extremely fast growing and excellent at colonising open habitats so has become somewhat of an enemy at Hothfield Heathlands. Thankfully, an army of Kent Wildlife Trust’s volunteers work tirelessly to keep birch from taking over by ‘birch popping’ – literally pulling out young saplings before they’re too large to handle.
Naturally, even our army of dedicated volunteers can’t get every single sapling and over the years, some birch trees have slipped passed the guillotine and begun to take hold. After several years we have seen that our bogs are not able to retain as much moisture in the summer and this is putting several species at risk, including the keeled skimmer dragonfly.
Thankfully, because of funding from The Wildlife Trusts Precious Peatlands project and Natural England funding from the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, we have been able to tackle the tree takeover. Working on two hectares of Hothfield over four distinct areas around the wetland, we’ve hired contractors with specialist equipment to pull trees from their roots. The roots get separated from their trunks and piled up together to make hibernacula (habitats for reptiles), and the limbs get processed for firewood or wood chip.
Ruthless as it may seem, and a nuisance to local walkers who are forced to wear wellington boots in places where the ground has become muddy, this work is vital to helping wildlife at Hothfield Heathlands thrive. The open ground created by the diggers will create opportunities where invertebrates can burrow, and new young shoots can grow. They can also fill with rainwater and create shallow pools which are another great wetland habitat.
To see what sort of results we are hoping to achieve, you just have to look at the pictures below from similar work carried out in January this year. After the work, the exposed mud was quickly colonised by tormentil, heath bed straw and rushes. Within just a few years, we will see a lush heathland full of life. Heather provides the main structure of the landscape and more low lying areas are filled with species such as rushes, tormentil and orchids.
