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.
At the end of November, the last mowing of grasslands took place at Dívčí Hrady. The uncut strips (from summer) were cut. If we left old biomass unremoved, nutrients accumulate and vegetation becomes homogeneous. Mowing can efficiently support a variety of small herbs and less competitive grass species. This will help to support diverse insect species.
At the beginning of winter, we turned on our chainsaws, a brushcutter and we started carving tree and shrub species on the overgrown slopes of Albrechtův vrch. The aim of the intervention is to remove almost 75% of the trees and shrubs to create semi-open habitats with a forest-steppe vegetation structure. This will support several butterfly species and other groups of arthropods that need open habitats. During the following years, we will maintain these areas by performing mosaic mowing, and hopefully also by introducing goats and sheep to graze.
At the beginning of October, we borrowed a sowing machine and created several small patches at Albrechtův vrch. We then sowed a mixture of nectar-rich plants in these patches by hand to provide butterflies and other pollinators with more food during the growing season.
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.
