What wildlife is found at Wildmoor Heath?
BBOWT has cattle grazing Wildmoor Heath nature reserve in east Berkshire once more to help maintain the open heathland habitat which is home to rare and threatened species such as Dartford warbler, nightjar, adder, grayling and silver-studded blue butterflies.
How are heathlands managed?
Traditionally, heathlands like Wildmoor Heath would have been maintained by a combination of grazing with livestock and cutting the woody vegetation like gorse and birch, as part of subsistence agriculture.
This replicated the effect of large animals such as European bison and aurochs which freely roamed the land in the distant past and helped establish some of these open habitats. Aurochs are ancestors of modern cattle.
The landscape at Wildmoor Heath is a consequence of human activity over hundreds, if not thousands of years but the heathland would soon disappear, along with the associated species, if left unmanaged; birch and pine trees would grow and eventually woodland would replace the heather, gorse, fine grasses and wild flowers through a process known as ‘natural succession’.
How do the cattle help?
Whilst the scrub cutting we carry out every winter helps moderate natural succession, grazing helps manage more competitive species allowing less competitive plants to thrive, thereby creating more variety.
Large grazing animals, like cattle, also break up areas of scrub as they walk through to feed on plants. They create areas of bare ground where they feed or trample. The animals also remove the dead grass and leaves that get trapped between the grasses and heather and the soil. All this helps create the right conditions for our rare and common heathland plants and animals to thrive.
