Page 25 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #04

SALISBURY PLAIN

THE JEWEL IN THE
CROWN IS 14,000

HECTARES OF
VERY BIODIVERSE
CHALK GRASSLAND.

increase when the last nature reserves in Europe.” Conservationists like Goulson Above: BBC
British Army units and Shardlow have three excellent reasons to rave about Wildlife features
editor Ben Hoare
return to the UK from the MoD training area: species diversity, abundance and
and MoD ecologist
Germany in 2019. connectivity. When so much of Britain’s land is fragmented, Julie Swain explore
Instead of the leaving isolated pockets of good-quality habitat as nature the SPTA, with
usual patchwork of reserves, here there is an embarrassment of riches. cinnabar moth
villages and farms, the caterpillars in the
map shows a single BUILT ON CHALK foreground. Left:
the vast wilderness
community of note on Salisbury Plain is an undulating dry chalk plateau, seldom feels like rural
MoD land. But it’s an above 200m, built from the remains of countless tiny France or Tuscany.
eerie ghost village. In 1943, Imber was evacuated to make marine creatures deposited millions of years ago on the
way for military wargaming; bats, badgers and swallows bed of an ancient ocean. Today, much of it is prairie-style
are its only inhabitants today. Imber was the last in a long farmland producing wheat and crops such as oilseed rape,
line of human settlements within what we now know as the mostly devoid of tree cover. Within the MoD zone, however,
SPTA, which is riddled with prehistoric earthworks, barrows patches of scrub and woodland are scattered here and there,
and hill forts, some 6,000 years old. while valleys are left to get wetter, especially in winter, and
Enforced depopulation means most of the area has gone so support distinct plant communities.
unploughed and unfenced for over seven decades, and – The jewel in the crown is the SPTA’s 14,000 hectares
uniquely for an English landscape of this size – has never of biodiverse chalk grassland, the biggest continuous
known industrial fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides. While expanse in north-west Europe. This is where most of the
the post-war drive to boost food production transformed vast rare flora and fauna is to be found: breeding birds such as
tracts of the UK, this portion of Salisbury Plain remained stone curlew and quail, marsh fritillary butterflies, unusual
frozen in time. “So it’s simply phenomenal for wildflowers beetles, an array of threatened bumblebees and moths,
and invertebrates,” says Matt Shardlow, CEO of Buglife. numerous now-scarce chalk-loving wildflowers. In all, 67
Here, at least, military objectives trumped the need nationally rare or scarce invertebrates occur. For a species
to feed a nation. As entomologist Dave Goulson wryly like the solitary bee Melitta dimidiata that depends on a plant
observes in his 2017 book Bee Quest, “the Kaiser and Hitler called sainfoin, this is virtually their only site in the country.
perhaps deserve some grudging acknowledgement, for their Several pairs of extremely rare Montagu’s harriers spend
actions unwittingly led to the creation of one of the largest the summer on Salisbury Plain, preferring to nest in tall
April 2018 BBC Wildlife 25