Everyone needs a suitable environment for their lives. Butterflies and many other arthropods thrive best in a divers landscape that is neither too overgrown with bushes and trees nor too bare. They need plenty of host plants that caterpillars consume and plenty of nectar-rich plants for adults. We try to create such a landscape for them by sowing herbs, pruning or felling trees, mowing, pulling turf and other activities. Sometimes it may seem that we are destroying nature, but our interventions really help to target species rather to harm them.
For the third and last time (this year), we mowed vegetation and removed biomass from sainfoin patches. We applied hand mowing due to the small size of the patches and to keep resources for pollinators in the close surrounding of mown areas.
At the beginning of September, the third strip mowing of meadows at Na Rovinách took place. The uncut strips are full of pink blossoms of sainfoin. Further management action took place in forest-steppe stands near Albrechtův vrch, where another meadow area was mown using a mosaic pattern and biomass was removed.
On August 10, we tried our newly purchased brush cutter and started with a mosaic-like mowing of forest-steppe stands in the meadow areas at Albrechtův vrch. As the name suggests, mowing is performed in the shape of a mosaic – some places remain uncut so that residents from mown places can move there. After some time, unmown patches are mown as well.
At Dívčí hrady, halves of the sainfoin patches were mowed with the aim of rejuvenating the patch (initiate repeated blooming) and, at the same time, mosaic-like mowing was carried out in the surrounding grassland matrix.
The first mosaic mowing took place by mechanization at Dívčí hrady and Na Rovinách, where almost half of the grassland area was mown. Jaroslav Kocourek made some nice aerial pictures using a drone.
