Management of wildlife in Bridge of Allan/Dunblane Area
From "Ward 4 - Stirling North"
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Areas of land under Council Control should be clearly designated as being managed for wildlife or amenity. Areas managed for wildlife should be reserved for native species and a programme put in place to gradually remove non-native plants. In particular this must include Invasive Non-native species like giant hogweed.
Community Councils should be tasked to set a management group to develop a Wildlife Management Plan for their area .... both Dunblane and BoA have large numbers of knowledgeable naturalist as residents and would have no trouble doing this. There is also have a lot of council land in these areas to be managed like Mine Woods, Hawes Park. Laighills etc.
I am worried about plans to stop the use of use of herbicides. It sounds a great goal but BoA and Dunblane would quickly get over-run by Giant Hogweed were such a plan implemented.
The pollinator strategy also needs careful thought. If you really want to increase pollinators like Bees it would be much more effective to manage areas of existing grassland to stop them getting overgrown rather than planting wildflower verges. These verges make the uninformed think the jobs done when a small area is seeded with wildlflowers. However the impact on the real insect population is trivial. There are huge areas of council land that are getting overgrown with coarse grasses followed by scrub and woodland. Simply mowing rides through them once a year would help bees a lot. For example the verges on the A9 and M9 in the Dunblane and BoA areas could contribute many hectares of pollinator friendly wildflower meadows. The Lecropt Orchid Bank on the A9 could become a wildlfower and insect oasis with a few man-days of management work per year. As it is it will become scrub covered in two years.
There is a need for a system of marking areas of council maintained land that contain rare plants like orchids to avoid council staff damaging them. Last summer all three areas of the castle mound containing 'star of Bethlehem' were strimmed to the ground. The rare 'toothwort' in Cameronhaugh Park in BoA was partly mowed down too.
Dr Roy Sexton (Botanist)