Moor Closes, 5th July 2009
This site near Ancaster is an area of old grazing fields that have not been
enriched and still possess a rich assortment of meadow wildflowers.
Eight of us turned out and our task was to help the site manager with the
annual count of the orchids in one of the 4 fields that make up the site.
The majority are common spotted orchids, many of which were still in flower,
but there were also a few clumps of early marsh orchid, although these were
well past their best.
James, the site manager had laid out a series of flags and lines of string
to section the field into 10m squares. We lined up, 2m apart and
walked slowly across the sectors counting the orchids we could see and
calling out our count every 10 metres. At the end, we then walked back down
the line and carried it over to mark out the next section.
The weather was sunny and rather hot standing in the field, although there
were plenty of threatening black clouds to shield us while not actually
delivering their rain. We had plenty of water breaks to avoid
heatstroke.
By the end of the day, we had completed most of the field and after a quick
count up, James announced that the count was about 35% down on the last
census. He believed this was due to the wet summers of the past couple of
years that had flooded the fields, preventing them from being grazed and
encouraging the reeds and long grass to the detriment of the orchids.
Julian
