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one year ago we helped create these Meadows and now they are booming with life and we've done so to help the most graceful the most etheral of all insects butterfly there is no insect as beloved as the colorful and vibrant butterfly ancient Egyptians put them on their tombs Veno used them as a symbol of Hope and these days Taylor Swift seems to like them as well they are universally loved across time however they are seemingly more of a cultural afterthought because we've been eradicating them from our Landscapes by destroying their main habitat which is of course Meadows so with this project we are trying to fight this trend by helping create a kind of Noah's Arc Meadow that can help stabilize the Free
Falling butterfly populations so that they can still be around when eventually public Consciousness finally catches up and decides to do something about this at scale I think this project really embodies this um Rew Wilding pragmatism because it can't always be returning to a 10,000 year old landscape full of large herbivores and large carnivores this year is about bringing back an agropastoral landscape from the last 500 years and that is really important as well because there's a lot of species that have gotten used to these habitats that are rapidly diminishing and that really need help so in this video today I want to introduce you to the complex world of meadow ecosystems I
want to show you the progress that we have made with this project in its first year and go on a butterfly hunt to see how many species we can find in our Meadows in one afternoon let's start by rolling back time and figuring out why these habitats actually exist you see Meadows and the species that rely on them evolved in a very different landscape that had two crucial components fire and large herb fores fires contemporarily clear the landscape of Woody vegetation and allow for Meadows to flourish in the Disturbed areas and large herbivores such as bison Oro or even mammoths would open up large areas through their browsing and grazing Behavior as human population spread and the herbivore meapa became less common
these Meadows could be expected to decline but they actually managed to stick around because as it turns out we were pretty good grazers ourselves well not us directly but the animals we heard it the Pline landscape was slowly replaced by a more familiar landscape of small scale hering and eventually farming and it turned out that we were actually a decent substitute for mammoths when it came to this job we created open areas by clearing forests for grazing and maintain them through Mowing and controlled burning we tilled the Earth compacting some areas While erating others and effectively maintaining that Mosaic of habitats where biodiversity FL flourishes and that is more or less how the landscape
was right up until the 20th century when we arrived at what I've previously described as a cabbage Armageddon and in our project area here this first manifested itself through the Soviet Union collectivization crop standardization and the technical modernization drastically reduced the diversity of farming practices and shattered the habitat mosic I don't think I've ever seen monoculture crop Fields as big as the ones that still exist today in Slovakia but there's no point complaining about the past because we can actually complain a lot about the present one could dedicate a video to explaining how the EU common agricultural policy is a disaster however today not that day so in short the problem is that subsidies are aimed
at large- scale intensive monoculture farming to the detriment of smaller scale and more Diversified Farms it's promoting the opposite of a mosaic so that is how we got to this landscape so now let's look at our project area which is here near bechko in Slovakia this place here is a great visual representation of the problem as every centimeter of land around here is used for farming in huge collectivized Soviet style fields that are now subsidized by poorly thought through EU subsidies but there is still this small hill here that isn't suitable for industrial farming and this is where BR our amazing Slovak partners have a plan to create a micro reserve for pollinating butterflies
moths bees and their host plants the plan has two main components that should feel familiar to you by now reducing the Woody vegetation by getting rid of the artificially introduced Pines and the non-native ACAA and introducing conservation grazing to 20 hectares in order to improve grassland biodiversity we supported Bros with € 21,000 for this phase of the project and by the time that I visited in April 2023 most of the Woody vegetation was already cut so I couldn't get a proper before shut for however by the amount of ACAA stumps I think you get the picture here it's been really cool to see the areas where the acaas have been removed I mean it's not beautiful but I'm excited for what this
is going to look like later and yeah now the ball is in Nature's court and we wait for spring and the goats came The Meadows flourished and the butterflies boomed but as I can't be everywhere at the same time I decided to wait another year to show you this project in its second spring so now in 2024 I'm really excited to introduce you to the Expo it's a uh mixed group of uh goats and also sheep because they have different uh grazing behaviors and that's really important to make sure that we also diversify the way that the plants are uh are gra and as you can see they have a good uh Team dynamic going on they're uh they're good friends different animals graze and browse differently sheep are more like
lawnmowers and keep the ground vegetation short in height while goats are fond of browsing shrubs and are also more Nimble and capable of reaching harder to reach areas in the future Bros might also want to add a donkey to the mix as they are more capable of keeping Woody succession at Bay so here we have those uh invasive plans after the goats have hit them and as you can see here they have essentially been uh cutting the tops off which is um a really good way to slowly make a dent on the seed bank so if the goats are eating the tops of the plants all the time there'll be less seeds going into the ground and year by year the seed bank will disappear so it's a really good way to try to get rid
of these invasives for good or at least really suppress them so that their presence isn't affecting other species the herd also comes with another benefit to a healthy Meadow because um to quote bro here matters and to make sure all the goat poo is healthy bro administers all the parasite medicine in winter when the goats are not out in nature this means that during the spring and summer when they're out at The Meadows the poo is in great condition to be used by all sorts of creatures such as these dung beetles who are trying to roll it back to their underground Nest to lay eggs on the dunp please not my backpack you y you got to be held back boy this B this the B you be all right chill man what is your problem huh so as you
can see goats are stubborn creatur that go through Great Lengths to get what they want which is why we need fences both to keep them in and sometimes to keep them out and that is why we are supporting brw with €7,000 to cover the materials and the general grazing infrastructure to uh hold the likes of new back a bit so here behind this fence we are protecting a plant called arisia clematitis and it's actually a pretty special plant that also serves a particular butterfly called zeria poly but we don't have this butterfly here yet it's actually been found 2 kilm away so part of this is also to try to create a new place for these butterflies to go so that's why this plant is currently
being protected but once it's stronger and once it's spreads a bit more we'll also let the grazers uh in this area but for now it's really important to ensure that these ones multiply so now I think it's about time that we go explore these Meadows and see what kinds of butterflies we can find but as we do so I would just like to remind you that these Meadows can only flourish because of the support of our Mossy Earth members who join us with a monthly subscription and make projects like this achievable so if that sounds like something you would like to support then please consider becoming a member at Mossy do Earth for this butterfly hunt I'll be going with Mishka from bro and luo who is a walking Encyclopedia of
butterfly and plant knowledge the first factor which can limit our search is the season white butterflies can be expected earlier in the spring during April and the start of May my visit was at the end of May and this seemed to be true because we only saw a single white butterfly called piis rapay or small white the first species for our list then a mix of blue butterfly species can be expected from the end of May through to September and we saw loads of them which will get into in a minute and then a mix of brown butterfly species which have a shorter season can be expected from mid June through to Mid August and we were lucky and saw a few of them which arrived early this year as we
walked these Meadows it became clear to me just how many of these butterflies are monophagous meaning they depend on a single plant we found the green Underside blue or glops Alexis which lays its eggs exclusively on the young flowers of this species here called Crown vetch or coron VAR we also found the black medic flower or medicago Lupul ulina which is used by two butterflies we did not see this time called Eastern short tailed blue or AES de coloratus and short tailed blue everes aradas in the dry Sunny slopes of this hill we found White Stone crop or Sedum album and orine otum maximum who are both used by the checkered blue butterfly scol tandis oron to lay its eggs and while we
did not find the butterfly we did find the eggs so it counts as a species for our list as we walked further it was clear that this place is managed for biodiversity emphasis on managed here there is no pretense of trying to leave this as a fully wild place here on top of the hill we have a great example of this attempt to try to mimic the conditions of how it would have been maybe a hundred years ago this is effectively a plowed field and of course it's a bit of a strange thing for us who work kry Wilding to be plowing Fields but the idea here is just to try to create a mix of as many habitats as possible so that this can be sort of a repository of biodiversity and uh if it means plowing a field in a
traditional way then that is what will be done here it's um it's trying to create that mix of conditions and the butterflies just kept coming we found the elegant small blue or Cito Minimus resting on a plant we found the extravagant silver studded blue or pleo Argus doing a bit of butterfly yoga to stretch its wings we found a few individuals of the beautiful Adonis blue poly matus Belarus perched on various flowers and then we saw Alon blue malola Alon and we got lucky to see them breeding and even see the female laying her eggs on a cross gentian gentiana cruciata a picky plant that likes bare soil but does not like the sun and requires 3 years of growth before it is
ready to produce flowers for the Alcon blue this kind of bigness is a Death Wish in our landscape these days but this place with its mix management approach can create the unique conditions required for this so here we have yet another part of the puzzle essentially this area was cut twice last year and the biomass was removed to essentially to reveal these uh these sort of open patches here and this allows new plants to settle once again to just try to give up opportunity to other species in amongst all of this diversity of habitats we also saw beetles bees of course and a variety of other insects and then we started finding all the brown butterflies such as this small Heath Kona pilus trying to
figure out how this plant works and eventually managing to pollinate it and its dazzling cousin the Pearly Heath konima Aria there was also a chestnut Heath kuna glycon taking a well-deserved rest after flying against the wind and we even got to see a breeding pair of meadow Browns Manola yorda near the plowed field in total we're helping improve around 20 hectares of this wonderful habitat which might not sound like much but for these species it goes a really long way and as we got near to the top of the hill we got to see another part of the puzzle these are open oak wood pastures which are quite rare Des days and another important part of this Mosaic and on top of the hill as
we got close to some flowers we stumbled upon another beautiful species of butterfly the idas blue or pleo idas and it was quickly joined by an alkan blue and a small Heath I think I understand now why butterflies fit so well in vango's paintings they are a relatively common site and so is a meadow and especially back in his day they used to be really common but somehow once you pay attention to these common sites you can reveal the ecstatic Beauty to be found in what would otherwise just be a boring old patch of grass on a hill I'm super pleased to see the results of this project and um it's so much fun just walking around poking like in between all the grasses looking at the
flowers and finding all the butterflies and then having lubo explain their stories their names and how they interact with their environment it's um such a fascinating habitat right under our noses and I hope that this video has made you enjoy Meadows a bit more it certainly has changed my perspective on them I knew they were important but now I can feel how they are important and that is a big deal and yeah this Meadow was only possible because of our Moss Earth members and so if you'd like to support our work support projects like this one here then please consider becoming a member at moss. Earth it's pretty cheap to join and when we put it all together when we put the contributions of everyone
together we can actually do really big things it's uh this sort of reing by the people like you and me for the people that will benefit from these Meadows in the future so a big thank you to everyone who enables this work until next time cheers
