Going microWild in Wicklow

All right, Collie, where did you take me to and who are we with? Introduce me to where we are.

We are in Balti Bly's estate on the banks of the beautiful Bleslin Lakes.

And this is my brother from another mother, Brian Murray, who set up and is running the amazing nature reserve specifically for invertebrates called Microworld.

And the reason that we've come here today is to have a bit of a nose around and see what happens in a meadow or it could even be a garden or a balcony or a portion of a garden when we stop mowing it, stop managing it and just give it back to nature.

Oh, and the day that we visited, there was a family friendly music festival happening on the other side of the lake.

So occasionally you might hear some music drifting over.

So we're walking across a lovely meadow and I see dock leaves and all sorts of things

growing.

Dock everywhere, yeah.

So there is dock in the meadow and I do allow it to grow, not wildly, but I do allow it to grow like the thistles as well because, you know, dock, there are two... insects in Ireland that have dock in their name at least.

There's the dock bug and the dock beetle and both of those have a reliance on dock.

So we might even see a dock bug down here.

I've seen them over the last few weeks.

And duck beetles are beautiful metallic green small beetles.

They lay their eggs on the duck and the larvae come out and they eat the duck.

So if you see a duck with loads of, you know, the leaves are kind of chewed away.

Yeah.

That's more than likely they have duck beetles on them.

Great.

So this meadow is microwild?

This

meadow.

The next meadow, okay, lovely.

The sheep graze here.

The sheep are not allowed in the microwild meadow.