There is some exciting habitat management work going on at Arne.
Heathland takes a lot of management to keep it in good shape for wildlife. Over the last few years we’ve been working hard, with funding from Biffa and HLS, to manage over 50ha of gorse on our reserves.
Now that the gorse is cut we need to follow this work up to stop it growing back in huge blocks, and to help heather to take its place. Gorse is pretty tough so it’s important to break up the roots in areas where we don’t want it to grow.
There are lots of ways of doing this and we’ve been trying them out at Arne over the last few years. We believe that we can do more work in a shorter space using a tank than our traditional machinery.
This method has been used elsewhere, and now the chance has come up for us to borrow a tank and we’ve leapt at the opportunity. We hope the weight and speed of the tank will disturb the ground so much that we will be able to see the bare sandy soil. This is great news for a whole range of heathland species, such as sand lizards, velvet ants, Purbeck mason wasps and green tiger beetles, who rely on the bare ground to burrow, hunt and nest in.
