This June, wildlife charity People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) has launched a brand-new garden survey, ‘Map your log pile’, to help save endangered stag beetles and other wildlife.
PTES is asking anyone with a garden or access to a local green space – including school playgrounds, churchyards, parks, allotments, and traditional orchards – to create a log pile (or pyramid) for stag beetles and other invertebrates, and record their location online.
This will enable PTES to see where these important deadwood habitats exist, where more need to be created, and hopefully inspire others to create their own too.
Creating a log pile is easy; simply keep any logs, wood chips, old firewood, or fallen branches and place them in a corner of your garden or green space. The log pile can be neat or untidy (insects don’t mind!) and can be made using a variety of different sized pieces of dead wood and leaves.
Different locations will attract different species – if positioned in the shade, the log pile will stay damp and is good for fungi, mosses, and some invertebrates, but if in full sun, the wood will dry out and is good for solitary bees.
Tree stumps or hedges that have either died naturally or have been cut down can also be retained and added too.
To make a log pyramid that will benefit stag beetles specifically, you will need to partially bury the logs upright in the soil. To enable stag beetles to lay their eggs, and for larvae to move in and out, make sure there is space filled with soil in between the logs.
Once your log pile, pyramid and/or tree stumps are in place, simply record their location online.
Laura Bower, Conservation Officer at PTES, explains:
“Gardens and green spaces are a haven for all sorts of wildlife. Creating log piles, pyramids and leaving dead wood to rot down into the soil makes the perfect habitat for a whole host of species, including stag beetles which, like many invertebrates, are declining across the country due to habitat loss.
“Stag beetles have even become extinct in some parts of Europe, which we can’t let happen here in the UK. Helping invertebrates in this way couldn’t be easier, so we hope lots of people can help by making a stag beetle a home this summer!”
No idea why my truthful comment was deleted. I’ll just say this instead – the environment will never be safe until there are new laws brought in to say that anyone buying a property with an established garden can not just destroy it and cover it with concrete or gravel. And that there must be areas set aside to help wildlife. Most people don’t care. -that is the unpalatable truth, they just want to do what they want to do and if they have no interest or concern in having plants growing and Nature around them, they will remove it.
Gardens and green spaces are a haven for all sorts of wildlife
……
wont be any if these idiots keep agreeing to every request for yet another hideous benefit hutch to be built