The willful persecution of our wild places, our wildlife, and the wildness within us all, has reached its limit!
We have to make space for wilderness to flourish in our land, in our lives, and in ourselves, if we are to share the future with life and love.
It’s ragwort time of year again. Ragwort is a tall, yellow-flowering member of the daisy or aster family, and it’s just coming into flower now. It is native across northern Europe and Asia and provides a great deal of nectar and vital habitat for many local insects. On the other hand, it is poisonous to horses and cows, and to a lesser extent to sheep and goats.
The benefits to our wildlife are, of course, entirely submerged in the minds of many country folk compared to any threat to their animals. These are complex issues though, and worth unpicking.
When it is growing naturally in a field of grass, healthy horses and cows will graze around ragwort, leaving it alone. When their other foods are depleted, they may feel forced to graze it, and mineral deficient cattle may be attracted to it because it is rich in minerals. The wilting process, if it is cut or sprayed with herbicide, increases its sugar concentration and makes it much more attractive to foraging animals who would normally avoid it. Its worst effect comes if it is mown into hay or silage. Cattle cannot distinguish it in silage, and it does not lose any of its toxicity. In fact, its toxins spread and one single plant in a bale can be enough to be harmful.
So it is clear why farmers are taught to dislike the stuff in their hay meadows, and indeed it is specified as an ‘injurious weed’ under a 57 year old local law. Looking up the Weeds (Jersey) Law 1961 on jerseylaw.je, it begins by saying, ‘The Minister, if satisfied that there are injurious weeds to which this Law applies growing upon any land, may cause to be served on the occupier of the land a notice in writing requiring him or her, within the time specified in the notice, to take such action as may be necessary to prevent the injurious weeds from spreading.’ There’s nothing about eradicating it from the island, or any requirement on everybody who sees it growing in the wild, or in our National Park, to destroy it on sight.
The plant is native here, and in the UK ragwort provides a home and food source to at least 77 insect species. For thirty of these species ragwort is their exclusive food source and it forms a significant part of the diet to another 22 species. English Nature identify a further 117 species that use ragwort as a nectar source whilst travelling between feeding and breeding sites, including solitary bees, hoverflies, moths, and butterflies.
Some of the species that totally depend on ragwort are very rare indeed.
Ragwort is an exclusive food source for ten rare or threatened insect species, including the cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae), the picture-winged fly (Campiglossa malaris), the scarce clouded knot horn moth (Homoeosoma nimbella), and the sussex emerald moth (Thalera fimbrialis). The remainder of the ten threatened species include three species of leaf beetle, another picture-winged fly, and three micro-moths.
Ragwort has an important role in maintaining the island’s biodiversity and is a vitally important component of our native flora and wild places.
A shortened version of this article appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 5 July 2018
