A walk around Willoughby Fields

Kevin Lerwill

Gatwick Greenspace Partnership Officer 

The Gatwick Greenspace Partnership Officers were recently joined by local ecologist Laurie Jackson for a walk around Willoughby Fields Local Wildlife Site (LWS) near Crawley. The site is owned by Crawley Borough Council and is now largely managed for bio-diversity and, although the remnants of the original old farm hedgerows are still evident, they have now encroached into the fields to create a patchwork of scrubby areas and mature woodland that support a diverse range of native plants and animals.

Although the walk was primarily intended to increase our plant identification skills (which it did) we were also regularly distracted by other things that we saw, heard or found along the way, including feathers from a Tawny Owl, a passing Willow Warbler, a brightly coloured Jersey Tiger Moth and a stunning Clouded Yellow Butterfly (which is a fast flying, late summer visitor to the UK from Europe and are normally very hard to photograph)!

It was great to be able to explore one of our favourite sites like this with a local expert and we recorded at least 59 species of plants (excluding trees) on our walk around just a couple of the fields, but we look forward to being able to work with the council to make it even better than it already is and hopefully we will be able to discover (and record) a lot more species at this important site in the future as well.