Despite being a conurbation of over 176,000 people, Southend is teeming with interesting wildlife. You just need to know what to look for and where to find it. This section of the Southend museums website aims to help you do just this. At present a very basic introduction to local wildlife, it will eventually enable you to browse through a gallery of our local plants, animals and fungi and the habitats in which they are to be found.

A brief description of the major wildlife habitats

Woodland

South east Essex has a fine patchwork of woodlands, many of them of ancient origin, the largest woods being at Hockley and Belfairs (Hadleigh Great Wood). It is important to realise that woodlands have traditionally been managed for their timber by a process called coppicing. This is a system whereby trees are cut back to ground level about every ten to fifteen years. They sprout again from the cut stump producing a cluster of thin pole-like stems which, after another ten to fifteen years, are cut back again, to give a crop of poles. 

In coppiced woodland, occasional trees are left to mature as large trees and these provide a source of bigger timber, suitable, in the past, for houses and ships. 

These scattered large trees are known as 'standards' and woods such as Hockley and Belfairs are classified as 'coppice with standards'. Typical woodland of south east Essex is coppiced Hornbeam trees with Oak standards.

Coppiced woodland is good for wildlife as long as coppicing is not neglected. Regular coppicing allows plenty of sunlight to reach the woodland floor and this encourages a varied growth of plants. Their flowers, in turn, provide food for insects which are fed upon by the birds and mammals of the woods. If the woodland also has mature trees (standards) and, very important, plenty of rotten stumps and logs, the flora and fauna can be very rich indeed. 

Many of the plants, insects , fungi and lichens will be characteristic of ancient woodland.

The Heath Fritillary butterfly is a good example of an insect which has benefited from coppicing. This rare butterfly was known from Essex in the 19th century but became extinct, probably because of woodlands becoming dark and overgrown when coppicing ended during this century. Coppicing for conservation purposes has, however, been carried out in several local woods since the 1970s. This has resulted in increased growth of woodland flowers, including Cow-wheat, which is the plant upon which the caterpillars of the Heath Fritillary feed. Colonies of the butterfly have been established by English Nature in four local woodlands and this butterfly is surviving well in places it had not lived in for many decades.

Not all woodland is of ancient origin, however. There are many examples in our area of what we call Secondary Woodland. This arises when land is abandoned; grassland becomes invaded by brambles and bushes of blackthorn, hawthorn and elder as well as suckers of elm (the original parent trees usually having died from Dutch Elm Disease back in the 1970s). Ash trees are also characteristic of more established secondary woodland. 

Hedgerows

Hedgerows are rather like long thin woods that mark the boundaries of fields and often link woodland habitats. Sadly, many have disappeared over the last fifty years, in the name of agricultural improvement. In general, the older a hedgerow, the greater the number of different trees and shrubs that it can be expected to contain.

Grassland

Where bushes are prevented from growing, by mowing or animal grazing, a grassland vegetation develops. 

The grasslands of the south-facing slopes of the Southend area are habitats for many interesting plants such as the rare Hartwort, Deptford Pink, Field Garlic and flowers of the pea family such as Grass Vetchling and the rarities Hairy Vetchling and Bithynian Vetch. 

Sympathetic management at both Benfleet Downs and the Belton Hills, Leigh, is encouraging the development of a rich grassland flora which is beneficial to butterflies such as the Common Blue and the rare Marbled White.

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