Highfield Moss is one of the Wildlife Trust’s most exciting nature reserves, particularly if you are a pollinator.
Man has created a series of apartments for solitary bees along the busy Liverpool-Manchester railway line, but most rail travellers will have no idea.
Those sandy spoil heaps were placed here when the world’s first passenger line was being built by George Stephenson between 1826 and 1830, but the Georgian workers, didn’t realise they were building homes for the bees, as well as a quick transport route for passengers.
Highfield Moss is 12 hectares of mainly peatland habitat, but I always head for the sandy area. On warm days I can spend hours watching hundreds of tiny holes, waiting for a head to pop out, eyes and antennae checking out the surroundings.
There are mining bees in those holes and bumble bees buzzing around the grass, joined by a colourful selection of wasps, hoverflies and other pollinators. Tawny mining bees and buffish mining bees are my main focus, and on spring and summer days insect enthusiasts won’t be disappointed.
We need more insect fans because these vitally important creatures have decreased massively over the past 50 years and without our pollinators a large percentage of our supermarket shelves would be empty. Make sure you create nectar cafes in your garden.
Back in the sand, those man-made hills are bustling insect cities when the sun shines, and bad news about nature seems a long train journey down the line.
Recently, my colleagues Ben Hargreaves and Karl Horne, and Stuart Fraser from the Greater Manchester Environment Unit, paid a visit to Highfield along with members of the Greater Manchester Recording Group.
Ben is Lancashire Wildlife Trust’s Bee Man. He said: ‘The most notable species I recorded was Andrena flavipes or yellow legged mining bee, a solitary bee which is a recent arrival to the region and this represents the most northerly record in the west of the UK as far as I am aware.’
This is a fairly distinctive solitary bee, with both males and females showing distinctive buff-coloured hair bands on the abdomen.
Ben and the team recorded quite a few other insects – yellow meadow ant, flavous nomad bee, bare-saddled blood bee, bloomed furrow bee and smooth-faced furrow bee, who knew there was such diversity? Who knew there were so many different bees?
These raised areas are along the railway and they were laid on top of the peatland area all around. The reserve is a lowland raised valley mire: a rare type of wetland for Manchester and an important link in the Great Manchester Wetlands.
Plants like sphagnum moss, carnivorous round-leaved sundew, cross-leaved heath and lousewort grow out on the mire lawns. One stunning blue plant, the marsh gentian, is rare right across the UK, with its trumpet-shaped flowers. Highfield is a real stronghold for this plant.
