Nattergal’s Boothby - Rewilding Diaries - March 2024
Each month we share news with you on the fantastic progress and comings and goings at Nattergals site in Boothby, Lincolnshire.
Buzzards squabble over breakfast
Trail cameras are a great way to have a sneaky peek at wildlife in a way that you wouldn’t usually be able to capture. Placed away from public areas and left out for days at a time, the cameras take both still images and short videos when triggered by movement. This means when scouring back through the footage we can get anything from twigs bending in the breeze to badgers and buzzards!
Good places to put them are along well used tracks and overlooking water. Knowing that not only water, but also decay attracts life, our Ranger Lloyd Park recently placed one by a pheasant carcass. On retrieving the footage, he found lots of clips of buzzards squabbling over their meal-time….which, if you’d like, you can watch here as part of our digital WildMap platform.
So long to the laurels
Across the Wildland we have quite a few species that are not native to the UK – or visually appropriate for a rewilded landscape. For example, there are areas with cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) that were planted specifically for pheasants and game shooting (photo above). Laurel was brought into the UK more than 400 years ago from southeastern Europe and western Asia. Its glossy green leaves are evergreen so the shrub is often used for screening.
Compared to our native trees, which have co-evolved over millennia with wildlife, shrubs like laurel have less value in supporting biodiversity. Over the last week we’ve been removing some of them: often with a digger for speed and because many of them are too big to dig out (see below)! The end result will be giving more space for our native plants and making the landscape look a little more wild.
Apple grafting a huge success!
Over the last weekend of February, 28 people came to Boothby Wildland for an apple grafting workshop. The free event, supported by our Landscape Recovery funding, was so popular an extra session was added to meet demand. We were lucky enough to have Adam Cade (above, brown trousers) and Gareth Powell, local experts from Stamford Community Orchard Group, guiding the group.
Everyone was shown the technique of how to use a root stock and attach the growing shoots of an apple tree on top – a simple yet deceivingly tricky process of cutting both stems to neatly slot together. These are then bound together. There were proud smiles all around as people perfected their technique and grafted apple trees.
With lots of material available everyone had a chance to ‘make’ a tree to take home and one for our new community orchard. The new Boothby apple trees were potted up until they are ready to plant out. Local Lincolnshire varieties of apples were used and grafted onto standard rootstock, which produces long-living, large, traditional apple trees that are the best for supporting biodiversity.
We can’t think of a better way to kickstart our community orchard than having local people be involved…. literally from the very roots! Fingers crossed all the new apple trees grow and we look forward to finding a space for the orchard at Boothby – reaping fruitful rewards in years to come.