Shrike Shrublands

By Steve Jones

The Red-backed Shrike is an ambassador for one of the UK and Europe's most misunderstood habitats: open, species-rich grassland-shrubland mosaics.

 

Part advocacy, part 'how to', this concise booklet celebrates Shrike Shrublands and outlines how to create and manage them.

 

This guide is intended for farmers, nature reserve managers, land managers and anyone with a passion for wildlife in the countryside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Jones
• Release date: Jun 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223024057

Steve Jones

Steve has lived in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight on and off since 1995. An avid 'patch watcher', Steve considers Ventnor to be by far the best bird watching patch he's ever had. He's keen to encourage other bird watchers and naturalists to explore the area.

Book preview

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1 Introduction

‘S crub’ is a much-maligned habitat in official UK conservation and farming circles. Scrub ‘invades’ other habitats. Volunteers conduct ‘scrub bashing’ weekends. Farmers can lose public payments if there’s ‘too much’ scrub in their pasture.

Of course, the colonisation of important old grasslands by shrubs and trees can be enormously damaging to their existing values if left unchecked. But very often valuable areas of scrub are removed without good cause. I recently observed as a local Wildlife Trust systematically removed small, scattered patches of Dogwood, Wayfaring Tree and Elder from otherwise very open chalk grassland on the orders of the statutory conservation agency, removing long-standing features and reducing habitat heterogeneity to no good effect. 

Grassland-shrub mosaics can be enormously valuable, dynamic habitats. Yet we seem to resent their very existence and miss numerous opportunities to create more of them. A baffling example of this: many of our most prominent, respected, and influential nature conservation organisations choose to bypass the early successional stage of grassland-with-scattered-shrubs-and-trees in woodland creation projects. They instal solid plantations of even-aged whips (nursery transplants of trees and shrubs), bypassing the wonderfully biodiverse grassland-shrub mosaic stage of ecological succession that, under nature-guided circumstances, would be a normal part of woodland community assembly. I’m not suggesting that such dense planting isn’t appropriate in some circumstances. I’ve done some myself. What I am suggesting is that extensive planting should not be the default approach to woodland creation where significant nature conservation gain is the objective.

The gradual, sequential, unpredictable colonisation of open areas by trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants is a fascinating and enormously important part of nature recovery. The natural process of species assembly itself is an attribute of biodiversity that should be valued.

In woodland creation projects, rather than planting wall-to-wall thickets of even-age whips, we should always consider aiming early on for a mosaic of species-rich scrub and locally disturbed, structurally complex, species-rich grassland with enormous value for wildlife, including many species of conservation concern.

As these grassland-shrubland mosaics develop they can give additional positive benefits: they can gradually absorb atmospheric carbon; attenuate rainfall and reduce water run-off owing to their roughness and gluey organic matter build-up; provide wonderful spreading space for people; provide high-quality, healthy grazing and browsing habitat for livestock and space for the conservation of rare livestock breeds; and, of course, be a cost-effective precursor to natural woodland and wood pasture development.

It’s time we ditched the derogatory ‘scrub’ label and championed species-rich grassy ‘shrublands’.

This short booklet seeks to encourage the creation of new species-rich grassland-shrubland mosaics - ‘Shrike Shrublands’ - on existing species-poor sites, such as hitherto intensively managed pasture and arable land, and amenity grassland.

The words ‘scrub’ and ‘scrubland’ are here replaced by the words ‘shrub’ and ‘shrubland’ to signify a more positive stance. I hope the term ‘grassy shrubland’ creates an image for you of a mosaic of grassland with scattered shrubs, rather than a thicket of shrubs. The latter is valuable but here we include the ever-so-vital flowering grassland element.