The return of the Yellow Meadow Ant

         Ants have always been a part of life. They live in the garden, you see them on pavements, and of recent years I have come to know the wood ants of the Blean in Kent. But the ants I remember most fondly are the yellow meadow ants.

         When I was a child, entertainments were fewer, and going into the countryside was a favourite outing, even for town people like us, who lived in Croydon. One day, the choir I belonged to went for a day out and picnic at a place called Titsey Hill. It was out in open countryside, on the North Downs, beyond the furthest reaches of urban sprawl. We went into a meadow on the hillside, and it was a broad grassland punctuated by massive hummocky anthills. It was a day that I remember as a beacon of wonderfulness. Few details remain in my memory, apart from this great chalkland meadow on the hillside with its short turf and flowers. I always wanted to go back.

         Another time, we were visiting my aunt and uncle. For all they lived in Reading, they were country people at heart, and loved above all things swimming in the river and picnicking in the countryside. They took us to Peppard for a picnic, and here too was a meadow full of towering anthills. How lovely I thought it was! Another day of happiness, seared into my memory.

         I don’t suppose I really thought much about what those anthills were. It’s only now that I realize they were yellow meadow ants, Lasius flavus, and that they are the same “red ants” that colonize my garden, and that my neighbour wanted to destroy because they bite. I don't think they do.

         The common black ants in the garden build nests under convenient bits of stone or paving, and their nests are very shallow. The yellow ants, on the other hand, go deep down, and in the normal way you’ll never see them. But if you happen to dig in the wrong place, you may encounter them. They are rather small, and could easily be considered red rather than yellow. Their nest is made up of a series of passages and chambers, where they raise their brood and carry on the business of the colony. Where there is a lot of traffic on the ground surface, be it passing feet or cultivating machinery, the mounds have no chance to rise; they are constantly tamped down. But if there is no traffic, then gradually the hill rises higher and higher. We have a grass path down the side of our vegetable garden, and over the years the yellow ants have colonized the narrow strip of path alongside the fence. Its level has gradually risen, while the rest of the path, under the constant passage of feet, has gradually dished. The path now has a decided slope away from the fence. But who cares? The meadow ants are welcome guests. Their diet is made up of honeydew which is produced by the aphids they farm, and aphid nymphs (of which they consume vast numbers). These aphids live on plant roots. These ant-friendly aphids have abandoned their normal defensive armoury – things such as a thick skin, or wax to gum up a predator’s jaws – because the ants defend them, like the good farmers that they are. Also, the aphids have hairy bottoms – the hairs accumulate the honeydew and hold it, ready for the ants.

         Another denizen of ant meadows is the green woodpecker, Picus viridis. Woodpecker it may be, but what it mostly eats is ants. It’s an entrancingly exotic-looking bird, green, with a bright yellow rump and a red Mohican stripe on its head. Its cry is a hyena laugh, the soul of mockery. For a moment you wonder: Was that a woodpecker, or the Jack-in-the Green that I heard? Its other name is yaffle, a reference to its cry. This woodpecker is highly adapted to its ant diet. Its tongue is three times the length of its bill, and flicks out and into the anthill where it probes for ants and their larvae. Its saliva contains a glue to make sure they stick. On hot summer days, if you’re out on the downs, you’ll hear their laugh and see that flash of green and yellow as they fly off – up-down, up-down, in a swooping flight. Since I’ve made room for the ants, I find I’ve made room for a woodpecker too.

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         I’ve always been well-versed in the improvements of the Agricultural Revolution – we studied it at school. Turnip Townsend and the three-Course Rotation, Jethro Tull and the seed drill... But I hadn’t realized that a particular target of the improvements was the meadow ant. Those tussocky meadows used to be very, very common. They relied on a lack of disturbance. They were pasture fields which had never been ploughed, never resown, and not cut for hay. The grazing livestock would simply walk round the anthills, and graze off the delicate flora that grew on the mound, a tasty bite. Up to and into the 17th century, there was a very clear distinction between meadows and pasture. Meadows were most likely to be water meadows and were enriched by the flood, when the river carried silt onto the land. The land would be left ungrazed from January or February until a hay crop was cut in summer. After that, livestock would probably be turned onto the field. The combination of late summer manuring and enrichment from river silt compensated for the removal of grass for hay. Pasture ground, on the other hand, was grazed all year, and was continuously fed by the manure from the animals that grazed it. And this was where you’d find your ants.

         And then, along came the 18th century. Agricultural Improvement was all the rage. Landowners were keen to improve their crop yields, and – more importantly – their income. Those 18th century improvers took exception to the ant mounds. If you browse their writings, you’ll find some tasty language – “those destructive excrescences”, “poisonous wens”, “swelling ulcerous sores” (A General View of the Agriculture of Essex, vol ii, by Arthur Marshall, 1807, pp96-8). John French Burke lists them as vermin – together with earthworms, slugs, caterpillars, small birds, ravens, owls, pigeons, rats and mice – and just about anything else that moved (British Husbandry, 1837, p616). A more gracious commentator merely states that “They make the ground disagreeable to the eye and unpleasing to cattle” (A Compleat Body of Husbandry, Thomas Hale, vol 3, pp). It was not a nature-friendly time. They introduced sundry innovations. One was to alternate between meadow and pasture, another between arable and pasture. The disturbance and resowing was not conducive to meadow ants. But above all the improvers wanted to extirpate the ants from meadows. They were considered to impoverish the soil with their great mounds. The justification was a simple economic one – an ant-infested meadow was worth 5s per acre, while one where they’d been cleared would rise a good 15s in value. To the 18th and 19th century mind, and indeed until late in the 20th century, this reasoning was unassailable. Besides, we needed more food, to feed more people.

         The traditional method of removing meadow ant hills was with an ant spade, slow but effective. In NE Essex they used a very thin sharp spade, in the shape of a half-moon. They’d sink it into the centre of the mound and work round in a circle cutting turfy wedges which were then turned soil side up. A second man would then dig out all the ants and scatter them. Then the turves were relaid in the dish that had been created, making a level surface. In the spring, a roller was run across the meadow which was now beautifully smooth. Not that the ants gave up, they’d try and rise again. But the vigilant farmer would crush them down as soon as they appeared (Arthur Marshall, p97-8). William Ellis, another writer on improvement, called the mounds pissum-banks. I’ve never seen the term anywhere else, and even the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t list it. It must be Hertfordshire dialect.

         By the 18th century, an ant plough had been developed. Thomas Hale’s design was as follows:

“The timber part must be elm or ash, and its two sides about five inches square; the iron must be thick, and well steeled; and it is to be drawn by two or more horses lengthwise”. This was a hefty plough. He continues:

“This will cut through any depth of earth in the hills, and taking them off entire, they may be easily removed, and the surface left perfectly even...

The expence is little: a tolerable plow may be made for a couple of guineas... The price will be soon saved by the quantity of business done. As many hills may be cut down with this in a day, as would take ten or a dozen labourers a week” (p9).

Hale is adamant that the removed anthills must be taken away and destroyed, to prevent the ants recolonizing. As a lover of ants, I find this horrific reading. He advocates several possible means: burning them, or laying them in a heap where they get damp and rot, or putting them into a heap with cow-dung so that fermentation results, or spreading out the anthills and laying lime on them. What an orgy of destruction! (From A Compleat Body of Husbandry, vol III, 2 ed, 1763).

         Such books were the everyday reading of the landed gentleman keen to improve his estate. And meadow after meadow was reduced to a bowling-green smoothness. The destruction was not confined to the 18th century. Old pasture was still being “reclaimed” in the later 20th century, in the never-ending drive for greater productivity.

         But mercifully not everywhere. Here and there, where conservative land management prevailed, a few ant meadows survived. And in the late 20th century, the tide of opinion turned. We looked at the ravages wrought by industrial farming and saw the landscape we had created. And we recognized that we had a growing crisis of biodiversity, as species after species declined in numbers. We began to recognize the value of traditional farming methods, and the landscape it created. At last, the yellow meadow ant is being rehabilitated.

         Now you can find places where the old unimproved meadows are being carefully husbanded. Richmond Park is one such, and now boasts of “400,000 anthills with many over 200 years old”. Lytes Cary in Somerset has stunning ant-filled pastures. Haddon Hall boasts that its medieval parkland is “a swathe of large ant-hills... Although quite common in old pastures in the south of Britain, these mounds are rare in the north but Haddon has them in abundance”. All these are examples of old parkland, which, mercifully, was never improved.

         The leading expert on yellow meadow ants is Dr Tim King, of the University of Oxford, who has studied them for over 55 years. He regards them as a keystone species

“The yellow meadow ant, Lasius flavus, is the most abundant allogenic ecological engineer in grazed European grasslands, producing vegetated long-lasting mounds. It is so frequent and abundant that it must be regarded as a keystone species”.  

They contribute biodiversity to the grasslands they inhabit, because of the different plant community that grows on the mounds (especially since the mounds offer different aspects for those plants – north, south, east and west), the microhabitats they create and the invertebrates for which they provide niches.

Dr King has several talks available on Youtube, including

 Yellow Meadow Ants,  an important contributor to Biodiversity in Grasslands

I do encourage you to watch it.

https://www.royalparks.org.uk/visit/parks/richmond-park - wildlife

https://www.haddonhall.co.uk/flora_and_fauna/yellow-meadow-ants/

         Lastly, I would like to point up some relevance to Great Shelford in this account of meadow ants, because here, too, agricultural improvement worked its destruction. Improvement came late to Great Shelford. Land management here, largely in the hands of the colleges, was conservative, and there was little investment in modernization until the early 19th century. In 1835 the Great Shelford Enclosure was enacted. The old commons were enclosed, divided into allotments and redistributed among the commoners. Old pasture fields changed hands.

         The commons of Great Shelford stretched from High Green down Cambridge Road to Trumpington. They were largely open, but there was probably scrub growing on them. The area immediately to the east of Cambridge Road was rather damp, and probably had rush and rank grasses growing on it too. And you can bet your life there were meadow ants there. The ants can tolerate some dampness: they die if their mounds are flooded for more than 6 hours. I have made an effort to imagine what our common would have looked like pre-Enclosure, and the best example I can offer is the rough pasture field you can see at RSPB Fowlmere nature reserve. 

This field runs along the south-eastern edge of the reserve, and is often grazed by cattle. It’s damp and tussocky with rush and scrub, areas made bare by the cattle’s hooves, and ant mounds. Under this benign management, the ants have returned. Elsewhere on the reserve, areas kept open to encourage chalkland flora and butterflies have numbers of ant mounds. Recently in Shelford the Great Shelford Village Charity has opened up the fields behind More’s Meadow for recreation and conservation. I feel sure that, under the new management, which includes mowing to bring back the flowers, the ants will return too. Likewise at Great Shelford Clay Pit, now rechristened the Pocket Park, maintenance is focussing on opening up the front area as a wildflower meadow. With the vegetation now kept low, I hope that ants will colonize this open ground. And perhaps, too, buried seeds from the days when this was part of the Common will return and grow again. It would be lovely to have meadows and meadow ants in Shelford once more.

Helen Harwood, v1, uploaded December 2023