It is a warm but windy evening in East Sussex and we are on the hunt for glow worms.<\/p>\n
As the sun sets on the Benfield Hill Nature Reserve, just outside Hove, a distinct green glimmer starts to flicker in the chalk grasslands.<\/p>\n
This site is hailed as a “stronghold” for glow worms in Sussex and with the insects’ summer breeding season well under way, conservationists say they have spotted 60 glowing females on one evening at the reserve.<\/p>\n
It is Brighton and Hove’s oldest local nature reserve and a team of volunteers has been helping to manage the grasslands to promote glow worms. <\/p>\n
The glow worm population is thought to be at risk nationally from loss of habitat, climate change and light pollution.<\/p>\n
Sally Wadsworth, chair of Benfield Wildlife and Conservation Group, says some areas of grass are kept longer so that the females can crawl up the stalks for mating.<\/p>\n
“We’re trying different techniques and I think it is working because we’ve got such a good population here,” she added.<\/p>\n
On a windy summer’s evening, she is out on the nature reserve trying to spot them.<\/p>\n
“The females stick their bottoms in the air and switch on a green light, which is bioluminescence,” she says. <\/p>\n
“You can see little green stars all dotted around.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is a warm but windy evening in East Sussex and we are on the hunt for glow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713302,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-713301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}