AFON
Loving My Local
You gain an entirely new type of love for a place when you put your sweat, blood and (on the odd occasion) tears into making sure it doesn’t just survive, but thrives.
It’s not always easy living in the UK to have access to the great outdoors. Anyone who lives in a town or big city can attest to that. Even if there is a local park or common that you can get to, how natural is it really going to be? Living in Surrey I come across a lot of green, but not necessarily a lot of wild. As an ecology and conservation student I value the great outdoors and the hidden places that nature has to offer. There is one place that I love to go, so much so that I based my entire dissertation around it.
Chobham Common is a temperate lowland heathland. From an ecological point of view, this alone makes it quite special; it’s a globally rare and threatened habitat due to its uncommon soil type. From a more general point of view, the Common has a bountiful amount of wildlife and scenery to take in. Roe deer, red kites and common lizards are near guaranteed spots if you have the patience to look for them. If you’re lucky you’ll see an adder in the underbrush, or hear a cuckoo calling in late spring and summer. There are 1,400 acres of heathland that blossom across the summer months, exploding the rolling hills with pinks and whites, mixing in with yellows and greens, all plants fighting to be seen and to survive.
I love the Common. It’s a delicate ecosystem that needs maintenance, having been grazing land for so long in the 1800’s it now needs a little bit of TLC. Over the summer, cattle pens are put up to help keep the shrubs down and public footpaths are maintained year-round to make sure they are not only accessible by the public, but so they also don’t start encroaching on the surrounding habitat. The Surrey Wildlife Trust, until recently, were the main driving force behind this maintenance. In years past I would spend my months at home volunteering with them, shadowing the rangers who worked there and being a general extra pair of hands. You gain an entirely new type of love for a place when you put your sweat, blood and (on the odd occasion) tears into making sure it doesn’t just survive, but thrives.
This summer just gone I did my data collection for my dissertation project on Chobham Common. I collected over a thousand quadrats of data on the plant life to see if public foot traffic had an impact on the plant biodiversity on the common. Whilst I was submitting my project proposal I had to answer one simple question: why is this work important? Despite having a lot to say about the Common, I had to take an emotional step back from the situation. Why was the Common important? Why should people who didn’t grow up with it, people who didn’t walk it weekly, people who had never even seen it, care about it?
From a conservation perspective the site, as I already said, is quite rare and so the dynamics within its ecosystem can’t be seen in many other places. It is a SSSI- a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It has three listed ground nesting birds: the Woodlark, the Dartford Warbler and the Nightjar, a mix of migrating and resident species. These three species all rely on the heathland habitat for their home and nest sites, without it, their population size could take a serious hit. On top of this, the heathland is home to an ant species, Formica rufibarbis, also known as the red-barbed ant, which can only be found on Chobham Common. There are three remaining colonies and it is possibly the rarest animal resident in mainland Britain. These are just some examples of the rare species that Chobham Common is home to, and we haven’t even touched on the rarer plants that take residence there.
From the point of view of the public? This one is harder to answer, but could ultimately be more important. Engaging the general public in the natural world around them has boundless benefits. Not only do they experience something outside the norm of their day-to-day, but they can also take pride in knowing and helping their local environment thrive. On top of this, public involvement helps ensure the survival of the Common as it is and preserves the multitude of life that calls the Common home. The Common brings conservationists and the public together, so will always be one of the first things I’ll bring up when someone asks me about conservation in my local area.