Livestock management has been taking up a chunk of time as we look after the existing flocks made up from rare breed sheep including large numbers of Herdwicks, Hebridean and Manx Loughtan, with a few other individuals from other breeds.

The lambs have started to arrive this week with nearly 50 animals expected to be born. We have had a few issues with site visitors impacting the sheep, either with dogs off  leads or through direct impact on our fences, which causes the sheep to wander from their designated areas.

The Project with Plantlife to restore a larger population of Pasqueflowers in still ongoing with the second round of direct seeding completing in the autumn with six extra plots at Pegsdon Hills. This Spring will see the Plantlife personnel complete further fingertip searches on the 12 plots to look for germinating seedlings. The first flowers are coming out on the adult plants from the original small population at Pegsdon, and we are hopeful that the coming years will see many more plants in bloom across the site

Works at Barton Hill Farm on their Ravensburgh Bank and Rokum Hole grassland sites continues, with a follow up to the cattle grazing on the site last year. Staff and volunteers were able to concentrate on the cutting and treatment of woody vegetation, rather than spend time with cutting and raking grass and last years wildflowers.

The site is very steep in places and proved a challenge to cut entirely in previous years, with bramble and clematis encroaching on the grassland. Young scrub and coppice stools were cut by hand and treated with a herbicide to reduce regrowth rates.

We have begun using the NoFence cattle collars to track where the cows are grazing at a couple of sites. The compartment is mapped using a digital application and the animals are fitted with collar that receives an upload of the boundary and uses a GPS, when in sight of a satellite, to monitor location and delivers an audible warning if the animal strays, reinforced with a small shock, if the boundary is compromised. The animals learn quickly to respect the audible warning and shocks are very infrequent.

On our sites we set the digital boundary well outside of the physical site boundary fencing, so the animals are not capable of breaching the digital boundary at all. We then use the location data of animal movements to track where the animals spend their time, whether there are any preferential areas which are repeatedly grazed and any areas they avoid. This gives us a different view of the grazing impact, and in large compartments, makes for some interesting cross referencing with mapped locations of habitats and plant species