When Wild Ingleborough launched in June 2021 there was a new opportunity to collaborate with Natural England, as their Ingleborough National Nature Reserve (NNR) land now joined up with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserves around the mountain and surrounding dales, enabling Wild Ingleborough to manage the land for nature on a landscape scale.

A key component to the Wild Ingleborough program is to focus on nature recovery - increasing tree and scrub cover, allowing for natural regeneration to occur, and to improve the biodiversity and health of the grasslands that were previously managed for farming.

The newly acquired land that was purchased used to hold sheep, and so the pasture was grazed in a way that is good for growing sheep, but poor for biodiversity and nature. Sheep are well adapted to nibbling vegetation down to a low level and can seek out the tastier and more nutritious herbs and plants that grow around the grasses with their nimble mouths. The effect of this is that less palatable species such as thistles and rushes are then able to compete more easily and more species friendly vegetation gets no chance to grow, flower, and put out seed. This reduces biodiversity and creates a very low sward height for the grasses if grazing is too heavy.

For the calcareous grasslands and upland rush pastures now in our stewardship, with such potential for biodiversity, we needed to change the way we grazed. Luckily for us, Natural England already had a solution that has proven to work natural magic on their land - conservation grazing with native breed cattle.

Biological Land Engineers

When you visit an area that has been grazed by cattle for conservation purposes you can see a large contrast in colour and vegetation height right away from the abundance of plant species that have been allowed to flourish.

As I walk across one of the pastures to check the cattle and their water supplies, the air is filled with the aromas of bedstraws, wild thyme and yarrow.

Flowers of yellow, pink, purple, blue and white are abundant, and every few steps reveals a moth or butterfly from the undergrowth, finding sanctuary in the longer grasses.

I see where the cattle have been treading. The large red poll, blue-grey and shorthorn cattle that make up the herd are leaving scrapes and footprints wherever they go which opens the grassy sward to allow fresh seeds to get to the soil below.

Plants such as cowslip and oxslip are named for their eagerness to thrive in these areas where a cow has slipped and revealed open ground to seed into, and many more species take the same advantage. These hoof prints also fill up with rainwater which creates temporary mini ponds in places that are colonized by water-loving invertebrates and fly larvae. Such tiny, specific habitats can play a huge role in the bigger ecosystem.

As I follow the footprints, I see the ‘pats’, the cow dung that is left in the wake of their grazing efforts. It is perhaps not usually the most desirable thing to look closely at, cattle dung, but looking at the droppings of the herd you notice that these are not like the usual sloppy, acidic cowpats you normally see in dairy pasture cattle. These mounds of dung look more like the molehills. They are full of vegetative structure and as the cattle are all organic, they are also free of medicines and worming chemicals.

You can see from the number of invertebrates including dung beetles that thrive on the dung that this is regeneration in action and supports the foundation level of the food web. Fungi soon follows, taking advantage of the nutrients at offer as the dung is gradually broken down by organisms to improve the health of the soil.

Conclusion

The benefits of conservation grazing with low numbers of native cattle are already apparent on large swathes of the Ingleborough NNR after years of management by the NNR team. The newly acquired lands we have received, however, were a blank canvas. A new frontier for the cattle to kickstart biodiversity in.

It has been incredible to see the number of wildflowers, orchids, and butterfly species that have returned to these pastures after the cattle have started to transform the land, and the visual look of the grass seed heads blowing in the wind and the scent of nectar on the air is just breathtaking.

Our monitoring and research team have also found that natural regeneration of trees and shrubs is much higher in conservation grazed areas than in areas of sheep grazing, and grazing has shown to create enough diversity and disturbance to prevent grasses and dead vegetation from becoming too dominant which would prevent many plant species from growing.

In conclusion, life and biodiversity literally follows in the footsteps of the cattle. These amazing, resilient bioengineers of the land are continuing to improve the health of the pastures and bring a wash of colour and birdsong to land which so desperately needs a lease of life in the Yorkshire Dales.