Drumburgh Moss Blog 4 - Contacting a Land Manager

4.0 - Contacting a Land Manager

This final blog post will centre around an interview conducted via email correspondents with Kevin Scott.

Kevin Scott is the land manager at Drumburgh Moss, my intention was to film an interview with him but due to current circumstances I instead had to contact him via email in order to enquire about the conservation practices in use at the site, in which he responded.

The questions and responses are below:

What conservation practices do you have in place at the site? And how do you go about conducting them?

• We have carried out extensive restoration works to the more intact mire and adjacent areas that we think there is a good chance of successful restoration. This encompasses all of the area south of the disused railway line and we have done this by the following methods:

1. Felling birch woodland that had colonised the drier areas around the edge of the mire.

2. Creating bunded cells around the entire periphery of the mire to hold back water .

3. Blocking ditches that had been dug to drain the mire and facilitate peat extraction.

4. Re-profiling the cut peat face and creating bunded cells along its length.

5. Managing water levels so that water is close to the surface of the peat (at least 20cms)

as this will enable peat to continue to grow.

• The other areas of the reserve are managed by grazing with either native breed ponies or cattle. This is to maintain a diversity of habitats and not allow succession to occur uniformly across the site.
  

How do these conservation practices increase the biodiversity? And would you consider them to be 'successful' at increasing biodiversity?

• They don’t necessarily and that is not our main aim on this reserve, although in a national and international sense our work on this reserve will increase biodiversity by virtue of the fact most of Drumburgh Moss is a lowland raised mire, a very rare habitat.

• Around 95% of lowland raised mire in England has been destroyed or degrade to the point at which it cannot be realistically restored. There are several reasons for this but all are anthropogenic; the main one is extracting peat for horticulture/gardening (peat compost).

• Our primary aim is to restore this habitat which is special for a number of reasons and provides habitat to many specialist species but wouldn’t be the most biodiverse habitat there is. It is incredibly important habitat though and is also a very effective carbon sink (much more so than rainforest or woodland) as well as an important historical archive.
  

What are some examples of the species you have on site at Drumburgh Moss?

Some examples are:

• Butterflies: Large heath, green hairstreak, dark green fritillary, wall, large skipper, meadow brown, ringlet, orange tip, peacock and small tortoiseshell.

• Birds: Curlew, snipe, cuckoo, teal, reed bunting, stonechat, whinchat, sedge warbler, skylark, meadow pipit, tree pipit, barn owl, short-eared owl, peregrine.

• Dragonflies: Four-spotted chaser, large red damselfly, common hawker, emperor, common blue damselfly, azure damselfly, blue-tailed damselfly, black darter.

• Plants: Sphagnum mosses, sundews (great, oblong-leaved and round-leaved), bog rosemary, cranberry, cross-leaved heath, cotton sedges (common and hare’s-tail), heather, bilberry, northern marsh orchid.

• Also good for common lizards, adders and various amphibians.
  

Do you have any further plans for the future of the site with regards to biodiversity?

• Always but it’s not just about biodiversity; it’s also about bio-abundance. We want to see the populations that are currently present to be robust and secure, subject to natural processes. If there are species that should be there but aren’t for some reason we will consider whether we should and could take action to reintroduce them but this requires very careful consideration of a number of factors.

Short Eared Owl - Image Credits: Cumbria Wildlife Trust, 2019