Readers may remember, back in June, we conducted a ‘BioBlitz’ at Coalie Park at which our volunteer recorders found 264 species of plants and animals. Well in August we turned our attention to the other end of the river when we visited two Pentland Hill farms in the Water of Leith catchment – Easter Bavelaw Farm (by Thriepmuir Reservoir) and Cairns Farm Estate (by Harperrig Reservoir)
The two farms in question are part of the Wildlife Estate Scotland (WES) Cluster in the Hills. Involving a total of six farms this cluster focuses on delivering landscape scale habitat management which could include; landscape scale riparian planting, peatland restoration, and changes to grazing practices to promote biodiversity.
So what is a BioBlitz? well its an intense period of biological surveying in an attempt to record all the living species within a designated area. This gives a baseline record for an area and allows us to see what areas are already diverse and which could use some improvement.
This kind of activity require lots of keen wildlife and botanically minded WOLCT volunteers, and we also invited members of Edinburgh Natural History Society https://www.edinburghnaturalhistorysociety.org.uk/ , local BRISC recorders https://www.brisc.org.uk/ and experts in various fields including fungi and bryophytes
Day 1 – Easter Bavelaw
A beautiful sunny day welcomed our merry band of 17 recorders, as we met Becky on her farm. This farm has already been actively managing the land for wildlife as well as grazing sheep. Becky is also the driving force behind Project L-and https://l-and.co/ , which is how we met and decided that a BioBlitz would be a great place to start. L-and is exploring the potential for habitat creation, carbon sequestration, flood management and water quality regulation across the cluster of farms.
It was an extraordinary day of recording, with so many experts revealing rare and interesting plants and animals – including this beautiful lemon scented fern (with distinctive smell and curled edges), the alarming fungus infected zombie flies and hard to spot ercot fungus which contains LSD!
In total we blitzed 5 fields and recorded 352 species of wildflower, grasses, sedges, bryophytes, lichens, fungi, fern, birds, amphibians, mammals and invertebrates. Our next newsletter will contain all the statistic from the fields and the farm.
Day 2 – Cairn Farm Estate
In gorgeous glamourous surrounding we all met again, this time at Cairns Farm Estate Wedding Venue before we venturing into the field in less than ideal conditions. But recorders are a hardy bunch who spend the next 3 hours in driving wind and rain recording 184 species. We were a smaller team who did not spend as long in the field on this day but we were again astonished by the diversity.
The hovering Osprey was a delight but it was the fungi which really stool out on a ‘grassy knoll’ with 20 species recorded including ‘Deceivers’ and ‘Yellow Stainer‘
The farm also has a section of peat bog which delighted our moss experts and revealed the insectivorous sundew.
Conservation Officer Dan is hard at work analysing the results and will report with more detail in our next newsletter
