Talk about Snipe Dales

On Friday 23rd March 2018 James Forrester, LWT Warden, gave a talk on 'The Management and Ecology of Snipedales'.

Snipe Dales is one of the few semi-natural wet valley systems still surviving in Lincolnshire. It is an area of two halves with mixed woodland in the Country Park and wet valleys, grassland and scrub in the nature reserve.

With almost 40,000 visitors per year, Snipe Dales Country Park and Nature Reserve is an attraction at the southern end of the Lincolnshire Wolds. The geology of patches of glacial deposits on the Spilsby Sandstone overlying Kimmeridge Clay creates an assemblage of dry acid grassland and very wet grassland. There is a plantation of 50 year old Corsican Pine, now much reduced by felling following an outbreak of Dothistroma Red Band Needle Blight (DNB) that began around 2005. Rapid natural regeneration of deciduous woodland has outstripped efforts at managed replanting.

James showed us the modern timber harvesting methods used and how some dead-wood had been left, standing or lying, to promote biodiversity. The land is  managed to maximise the variety of habitats and biodiversity is enhanced by seeding the grasslands by green-hay spreading, managing the light levels in the wooded areas to promote the under-storey, and controlling the natural scrub growth by cutting and light grazing with sheep and with Longhorn and Lincoln Red cattle.

The stream system has been naturalised by removal of some of the artificial dams and culverts, allowing the trout and other fish to migrate easily. Along with trout and Miller's Thumbs are found the curious brook lamprey Lampetra planeri. a primitive, jawless fish resembling an eel, but less than six inches long. It is a non-migratory freshwater species, occurring in streams of high water quality and clean gravel beds in which it lays its eggs.

The Country Park is remarkably rich in fungi, with over 300 species recorded. There are, consequently, a great number of fungus gnats, some 120 species of which have been recorded here. If you are not sure just what a fungus gnat looks like, this web-page is useful.

Snipe Dales is described as 'semi-natural', but it is evident that, left to nature, the landscape would very quickly become a dense deciduous woodland, rapidly invaded with birch and hawthorn and, in the wetter areas, alder, with slower growing trees taking their place in the succession over time. But then in Britain before the Mesolithic, the megafauna of large herbivores would have done something equivalent to the work of James, his many volunteers who give up their time to help in scrub clearance and grassland management and the cattle. With no mammoths available, the chainsaw and tractor have their place in wildlife conservation.

For more information about Snipe Dales see the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust website.