Creating grassy-shrublands on arable
Arable farmland is an excellent place to create a block of flower-rich Shrike Shrubland from scratch. Paradoxically, the complete lack of vegetation cover enables the all-important herbaceous wildflowers to establish quickly without too much competition from a closed thatch of grasses.
Below, I summarise the key elements of the perfect grassy shrubland and how you might go about installing each element into your shrubland creation project in the first couple of years.
Size and position: Ideally, your arable site will cover several hectares at least as a large open, rectangular or circular block (linear hedgerows are valuable habitat but not what we’re discussing here). It will be open and sunny, warming up in summer.
Under-drained: does your arable field contain buried drainage infrastructure? If so, block it up. You want to stop such field drains from working. Doing so will re-establish a more diverse soil moisture pattern across the site and, if you’re lucky, enable lost seepages to re-ignite. The intricate mosaic of dryer and moister conditions across your resulting shrubland will support substantially more wildlife if moist patches are re-established.
Diverse landform: your arable has been ploughed probably for quite a long time, and this smooths out the soil surface wrinkles. Yet a micro topography of undulating soil surface gives rise to a mosaic of microhabitats and microclimates. So get a digger and re-introduce hills, valleys, dips and hollows to the ground surface. Check you don’t have vulnerable archaeological remains first though.
Clean water pools: dig some rain fed pools. Some deep, some shallow, with very shallow sides and wide muddy edges. Some will retain water all summer, some will dry out as the summer progresses. These differences suite different species so don’t assume all pools should retain water all summer.
Now we have the arable landform set up, we can move on to encouraging wildlife colonisation. Now, I’m all in favour of natural re-colonisation. But here I propose giving species a helping hand, overcoming some dispersal and colonisation limitations imposed by human’s misuse of the landscape, and ensuring nature recovers quickly. We have no time to loose…
Create brash piles and plant Bramble within them: Rabbits aren’t native but they’re brilliant ecosystem engineers. Red-backed Shrikes, and various other species, like to find accessible food on grazed ‘lawns’ and patches of disturbed ground distributed within a mosaic of flower-rich tall and short grassland. Rabbits combined with other grazers to create such habitat mosaics.
Plant small, widely-dispersed groups of thorny shrubs: Introduce small clumps of native, often thorny shrubs (Field and Dog Rose, Blackthorn, Hawthorne, Bramble etc). Don’t, whatever you do, plant shrubs in tubes across the whole site. Just widely distributed groups, each clump of planting being about four square metres and no larger. Use young nursery transplants. Try to avoid plastic tubes if possible; make sure you removed them after a few years of they’re unavoidable. A better approach might be to enclose each planted clump with a post-and-sheep-fence enclosure to exclude larger browsers. Red-backed Shrikes love to hunt from prominent watch points embedded within a large open area of flower-rich grassland. That’s what you’re creating by planting these small, widely spaced clumps. In time, the planted shrubs will set seed and these will disperse more widely across your shrubland.
Plant the odd lower-canopy tree: Within the small shrub clumps detailed above, plant one or two Field Maple, Crab Apple, Wild Pear. Over time these will form taller emergent trees and help other tree species to colonise. You should also consider planting some larger sun-germinating canopy trees like Oaks, although these will probably arrive eventually.
Use locally sourced green hay to introduce patches of flowering plants: now you’ve set your shrub clumps in place, identify a few areas where you’ll introduce grassland wildflowers. Don’t try to do this across the whole arable field: it’ll be too expensive and really isn’t necessary. You’re aiming to focus introduction of wildflowers into a few small areas from which they can then spread across your site. Select four of five patches of arable of around ten square metres. At each, spread green hay freshly collected from nearby species-rich grassland in late summer. You’re inoculating your patches with wildflower seeds. Shrikes love Bumblebees: no wildflowers, no pollen- and nectar-seeking insects. A flower-poor shrubland is barely worth bothering with.
Introduce shade-loving wildflowers at the edges of shrub clumps: If in the longer-term you’re aiming to create wood pasture or closed-canopy native woodland, consider introducing a few key woodland wildflowers in the shade of your planted shrub clumps. Wait for a few years for sufficient dappled shade to develop. Plant plugs, tubers, bulbs of, for example, Wood Anemone, Bluebell, Yellow Archangel and Lesser Celandine. You’ll probably need to source these from specialist, commercial wildflower firms that guarantee UK prominence. Plant in frost-free conditions late autumn.
Relax about deer: generally speaking, native deer will sculpt shrubland development rather than preventing it. Remember, although we have deer in high density, and have gained several non-native species, we have lost several large, wild grazers and browsers, notably Wild Cattle (Aurochs), Wild Horse, Rhino and Elephants, all of which would likely be present in the UK today if humans hadn't driven them globally extinct. Deer are diminutive mesa-herbivores when considered against these large mega herbivores.
Graze the site on-and-off with anti-parasite drug free cattle: While we can’t get the European Wild Cattle back, we can use their domesticated form instead: beef cattle. To mimic a herd of European Wild Cattle shifting across your landscape, only allow ivermectin-free cattle to wander across your site every few days, and only for a short period for each visit. You just want them to graze down some of the thicker herbaceous vegetation, poach the pool edges and deposit fresh dung for the dung beetles.
Allow space for Wild Boar: If you have Wild Boar locally, nurture them. If not, champion their return. In the meantime, install some old breed pigs to do the job of Wild Boar. The rootling behaviour of boar provides sward disturbance upon which a multitude of annual plans and associated insects depend. Celebrate disturbed soil!
Embrace bare and disturbed patches: Just to re-emphasise, bare ground is a vital component of a high quality grassy shrubland; completely closed, tightly grazed swards are fine, but patches of disturbance are crucial. Moles create small mounds of disturbance that go on to be colonised by a succession of wildflowers; they minute patches of early plant succession. If Wild Boar or pigs are not possible, set aside small areas to cultivate. Cultivated plots should be a few metres in extent. Have a few - five or six - and only cultivate one each year, returning to that one every five-six years. You might want to cultivate one or two more often - every two-three years - just to make sure you maintain areas of very open soil.
If you manage to do the things described above, you’ve set your site up to become a high quality, flower-rich grassy shrubland. How the site develops in the longer term depends on your own objectives, but we can see three main possible trajectories:
Maintained as species-rich open shrubland: A combination of light grazing and browsing, and perhaps the occasional mechanised cutting of shrub clumps on a long rotation, will ensure your site can be used for livestock grazing going forward.
Develop wood pasture: If you allow a few Oaks and other native canopy trees to grow tall, the shrubby component will gradually thin due to the combination of shade and browsing, and an enormously valuable wood pasture should develop.
Develop into natural woodland: If subjected to only very light grazing and browsing (and your site should be, over the long term), mature woodland will gradually develop, and it’ll be far more valuable for wildlife at all stages of development than the usual plantings of whips with grazing and browsing largely excluded.
Now, I hope the summary above is useful. If you’d like to read a deeper dive into Shrike Shrubland creation, I’ve written and published a guide available here: https://amzn.to/47ZFKVo (that’s an Amazon link. If you buy from Amazon via that link I’ll earn a small extra commission at no extra cost to you)
If you like my writing, please consider supporting it by buying me a coffee here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/SteveJWildWriter
