The Meadfleet team recently visited our Red House Farm development in Staffordshire for a Bug Hunt event. Our friends from Buglife lent their expertise for the day as a group of local residents of all ages took part in discovering the wide variety of insects and other wildlife sharing their local environment. Red House Farm is a joint Davidsons and Strata housing development, with extensive areas of open green space managed by Meadfleet to provide recreational areas alongside valuable wildlife habitat.
Biodiversity Training
The day began with the Meadfleet Operations Team attending to receive training on insect identification led by Rachel and Karim from leading wildlife charity Buglife. Meadfleet are a corporate sponsor of Buglife, and we work together to maximise our public open spaces for biodiversity. The Operations Team are responsible for implementing habitat creation and management on our open spaces, including our award-winning Bee Friendly campaign and our new Buzz and Flutter campaign. This event was the ideal opportunity for our team to see the benefits of such management, as they were dispatched with butterfly nets and sweep nets to find insects.
The results were amazing – the team first assessed an area of short mown grass, which supported limited insect life, but was still productive as a foraging area for the many swallows and house martins which were feeding over the grassland. The team then moved onto an area of taller grass which is allowed to grow throughout the summer, and large numbers of insects were present including numerous species of grasshopper, cricket and shield bug. Finally, an area of native wildflowers was assessed, which revealed a variety of bee, butterfly and moth species feeding on the nectar and pollen. This provided the perfect demonstration of the biodiversity value of providing taller grasslands and wildflower areas on our public open spaces.
Resident Bug Hunt Activity
Next the Buglife team and our Ecology Team led a bug hunt for local residents and customers. A group of intrepid bug hunters of all ages joined in to discover a wide variety of insects and to learn the benefit of pollinators, and the important role that all insects play in our daily lives. It was a great opportunity to chat to customers, and we received some fantastic feedback on the way that we manage the open spaces on Red House Farm to provide areas for recreation alongside wildlife habitats.
All attendees were provided with a goodie bag including a bird feeder and seed, a bug hotel and some wildflower seed, to help them to create a wildlife haven in their own gardens. All attendees also had the opportunity to enter a raffle for a fantastic Meadfleet hamper.
We love to hold events such as Bug Hunts and Bat Walks to encourage our customers and local communities to get closer to the wildlife in their local area, enabling us to explain the way we manage our open spaces to maximise benefits to biodiversity and to general wellbeing.
For more information about Buglife visit their website.
If you would like us to host a community event on your development, email us at communities@meadfleet.co.uk
About Meadfleet
Meadfleet are a leading sustainable land-adopting management company. We have in-house ecologists with expertise in the BNG metric and are already applying the principles of Biodiversity Net Gain across our existing open space portfolio in England and Wales. Established in 1995, Meadfleet manage over 330 developments and 42,000 residential properties in our portfolio, with a strong balance sheet.
Meadfleet offers management of Biodiversity Net Gain delivery both on a managed development and on offsite areas, either via customer contributions or commuted sums. Our adoption model relieves developers of ongoing liabilities and management costs.
The Meadfleet model removes onerous liabilities from homeowners yet still encourages their input and engagement into the management of their local environment. We are committed to providing an excellent service to residents as demonstrated by our Excellent rating on Trustpilot and are members of The Property Ombudsman Scheme (TPOS), offering customers free, independent redress should they feel it is required. We are happy to work with residents groups and positively encourage the creation of these on the developments we are involved with. We believe this opens an effective two-way dialogue between homeowners and ourselves.
As a land-adopting management company, Meadfleet take long-term responsibility of open space, building customer and community relations and implementing perpetual management and improvement plans. We take a holistic and independent approach to managing areas of open space for the benefit of all residents, biodiversity and the wider environment.