A a row of apple trees defend the mid-wicket boundary of Whalley Range cricket club in south Manchester, while old lime trees sporting bird feeders and nesting boxes watch from across the pitch. A lone herring gull prowls the outfield, while a noisy flock of starlings take up residence in the slides. In one corner of the pitch, a mound of grass clippings is allowed to slowly rot, the ideal habitat for grass snakes, although club president Mike Hill admits he has been reluctant to check if any have moved in.
Last year, the club won Cricketer magazine’s first UK Greenest Ground award for its work to promote biodiversity. Badgers, hedgehogs and foxes are all regular visitors and, with the help of the Woodland Trust, the grounds have over 200 trees, from a young horse chestnut to a mature Manchester poplar (also known as poplar fluffy black), which shades the score box.
The club stopped using pesticides, installed swift boxes under the clubhouse eaves and solar panels on the roof. The vegetables grow in large wooden planters and it is planned to do without plastic altogether.
“The neighbors love it,” Hill says. “You want to spend time here with color and calm.” As a sport, he says, cricket is more vulnerable than most to bad weather, and last year the club had to hose down the place in April but saw fixtures regularly washed away in June. “Climate change is very clear when you play cricket,” he says.
Across the UK, sports clubs are starting to do their part for biodiversity, giving up the urge to cut and tidy up, and allowing nature to take over. Even golf courses, dubbed “green deserts” by conservationists for years, are changing.
James Hutchinson, member services manager for ecology and sustainability at the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association, recalls the widespread spraying of pesticides in the 1980s. have a playground for golf,” he says.
The UK has around 3,000 registered golf courses, many of which border important biodiversity hotspots such as sand dunes, moorland and chalky land. Hutchinson’s job is to help these clubs manage their courses more naturally.
Many pesticides are now banned, so clubs need to find alternatives, says Hutchinson. For example, leatherjackets – crane fly larvae – are a real problem on the fairways as they eat grass roots. Badgers and crows seek out leather jackets, which causes more problems. Thus, several clubs have installed starling nesting boxes to encourage birds to join the courses because their slender beaks can catch insects without damaging the lawn.
Golf even has its own environmental awards and this year’s winners included Newquay Golf Club, where a sketchy eco-management plan has seen wildflowers such as Cranesbill, Scabies and Knapweed bloom and provide food for pollinators such as the dark green fritillary and the six-spotted burnet. butterfly. Weybrook Park Golf Club, near Basingstoke, has introduced lark protection zones, marked off areas that members have been happy to give away to the ground-nesting bird.
Water is the next big issue for clubs. “A number of courses may still use network irrigation, but they are on the way out,” says Hutchinson, who works with clubs to drill boreholes and create rainwater reservoirs for to meet their irrigation needs, as well as to grow more drought-tolerant types. of grass.
The Scottish Wildlife Trust works with clubs and the golfing charity FairWays Foundation, which is co-funding the Irvine to Girvan Nectar Network, a project to bring wildflower meadows back to the Ayrshire coast.
Network coordinator Lynne Bates visits clubs along the coast and provides flower seeds that can help create a continuous corridor, connecting the courses to local nature reserves. The project is already having an impact, she says, with the little blue returning to Ayrshire for the first time since the 1980s. Britain’s smallest butterfly needs kidney vetch for its caterpillars, and the plant is now abundant on many courses in Scotland and on other coastal courses in the UK.
“Simply tweaking the management of an area can make a huge difference,” says Bates. “Let it get a little messy, because it’s those long, slightly overgrown, slightly wild areas that wildlife love.”
The flat, sandy bunkers, with at least one edge uncut, are “invertebrate sun traps,” she says, recalling how a greenkeeper recently tweeted that solitary mining bees had taken up residence in one of its bunkers. Not so long ago they would have been considered pests.
Not everyone is convinced that the changes made by some golf courses are enough. Natalie Bennett, Green Party counterpart, says: “The kind of [biodiverse-friendly] the things they do are very small in scale and you still have fairways and greens which are an extremely destructive use of the land.
Pesticides, energy use and constant mowing all have a huge environmental impact, she says. “I’m not saying close every golf course in the country, but I think we need to look at land use…and that would mean, very clearly, fewer golf courses and that land would be better used socially and environmentally.
Other sports clubs are also reassessing their relationship to nature. Northfield Bowling Club in Ayr is part of the Nectar Network and gardener Kieron Gallagher has created a wildflower meadow on a shaded area of grass behind the main stand. As well as stripping the old grass, he planted yellow rattle, nicknamed the meadow maker, a semi-parasitic plant that taps into the roots of grass, weakening it and allowing other wildflowers to s ‘install.
Plants such as eyebright and bartsia play a similar role and are increasingly used by greenkeepers to thin out row meadows, where rogue species such as yorkshire fog and meadow grass have taken over. relay.
Additionally, the traditional roses have been ripped up to make way for another strip of wildflowers, and the new beds will provide pollen, nectar and habitat for other insects, Bates says. “It’s a ripple effect, so these insects coming in will be food for the birds. You need the little things down there to feed everything else.
The Girvan football club has also joined in, transforming the entrance to its pitch into a sensory garden, complete with fruit trees that attract pollinators. “He tries to show how sport and nature can coexist,” says Bates.
Elsewhere, Gloucester Rugby Club has partnered with the local wildlife trust to install three rainwater gardens at its Kingsholm stadium. Using shallow depressions and raised beds, the gardens capture rain that would normally flow into drains. By storing and filtering water, gardens can reduce flooding and prevent pollutants from entering rivers.
Back in Manchester, Hill points out young hawthorn and blackthorn bushes that have grown through tall grass and tufts of scarlet pimpernel. A five-foot-wide strip between neighbors’ fences and the edge of the cricket pitch grows wild and while the temptation may be to grab a trimmer, he says, this area is home to butterflies and bees. “It might be a bit difficult to find a cricket ball,” he adds, “but it’s not the end of the world, unlike climate change.”
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