Conservation grazing

It was a fairly early start for Chris, Pete and me, in order to get to the BCN Wildlife Trust's Members' Day at Trumpington by 9.30 a.m. I don't usually attend this event, as it always takes place on Alex's birthday weekend, but today I was being presented with the Oliver Rackham Award by the Trust President, Baroness Young of Scone. 

The award is given for an outstanding contribution to the Trust through conservation, monitoring or research. I first received the news when I was sitting on a Tiree beach at the end of a long day of fieldwork which had involved a nasty injury to my knee. As you can imagine it really raised my spirits! Oliver Rackham was an eminent historical and woodland ecologist, and his work had a major impact on me at the start of my career, so receipt of this award particularly resonated with me. 

The day was extremely well organised, and the keynote speech on the evolutionary ecology of burying beetles in two of the Wildlife Trust's woodlands was well planned, witty and informative, even though it left Pete, Chris and I with lots of questions. In the afternoon we went for a guided walk round the Trumpington Meadows NR, which had been created as part of a major housing development on land formerly managed by the Plant Breeding Institute. The reserve now supports extensive areas of species-rich grassland, which are developing very well, aided in part by these cattle, whose dung also supports a rich assemblage of coprophilous fungi. 

It turned out to be a very worthwhile day - I finally put faces to several Wildlife Trust staff that I frequently correspond with, and I also met the lovely Francis Dipper, a freelance marine biologist who has written many books on ocean life. The nature conservation world is surprisingly small - she's a friend of Lynne Farrell, who persuaded me to become a BSBI recorder, and also knows Jenny Heap, my first manager when I started with the Nature Conservancy Council back in 1985!