Monday 16 March 2015

Maggots at Work

The woolly maggots are currently roaming on Houndkirk Moor in parts where they've not recently been seen, in an area close to a lot of new fencing. They will be ensuring that the vegetation remains stunted and no trees get a hold on that section of the moor.

Lots of sheep graze the enclosure on Blacka doing a job that's never been satisfactorily explained to me unless it's to encourage the small number of birds that prefer devastated land, though they've not shown much commitment to it yet.

On the rest of the local moors there are fewer sheep than in many previous years.

The astonishing thing about grazing and the moors is that draconian measures are taken to reduce deer numbers at such short notice whereas for many years there were hundreds of sheep wherever you looked with barely a word spoken against them (apart from on this blog perhaps). The scale of the negative impact of sheep was also immense, while deer in much smaller numbers  spread over a far wider area have many positive effects - eating bramble as just one example.

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