Wild Cornwall No.101 Autumn 2006

CORNWALL

Wild Cornwall No.101 Autumn 2006

Wild Cornwall is the magazine of the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, published three times a year.

This edition of Wild Cornwall is now available as to download for free. The full-colour PDF is a large file, containing lots of colour photographs. You may wish to check if your Internet connection is sufficient before you attempt to download it.

We also hold a limited stock of printed copies of our most recent edition, so if you would like to receive a hard copy please to contact us for availability.

Wild Cornwall No100 Summer 2006

Editorial

Often avoided or overlooked, the thousands upon thousands of spineless, smaller creatures that make up the invertebrates – from microscopic organisms to the largest beetles and crickets – are a vital part of the ecosystem and we simply cannot live without them. Mistreatment of the countryside, such as regular mechanical flailing that reduces valuable Cornish hedges to uniform and species-poor barriers, has had a devastating effect upon populations of moths, butterflies and many other invertebrates. Several species of British bumblebee are threatened with extinction in the near future, which is bad news for agriculture as well as for wild flowers. Buglife, The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, is the first organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates. In his article ‘Incredible invertebrates’, Andrew Whitehouse of Buglife exudes enthusiasm for the subject, and in ‘A bug’s life’, Cornwall Wildlife Trust’s Callum Deveney describes active measures taken on our nature reserves to conserve invertebrate populations. We should all take invertebrate conservation very seriously. As stated on the Buglife web site, ‘without a concern for smaller animal life, all our claims of wise custodianship of animals are hollow’.

Rowena Millar