Crop and estate management
September is the start of our fourth crop year at the farm. With a three year rotation this means that the position of the different of crops across the fields is now the same as in our first year. Monitoring over the coming crop year will indicate if we have made lasting changes to our local bird populations. It could be that the changes that we have seen recently have been in response to the position of the crops in particular fields.
Mid September saw the beginning of the drilling of wheat in some of the fields in those fields that had been oilseed rape or set-aside last crop year. This is our first wheat in the rotation and it does not have any specific trials in it. The wheat that followed a previous wheat crop (the second wheat in the rotation) was drilled at the beginning of October.
It is in three of these fields that we are continuing our trial investigating the effect of crop structure on skylark breeding productivity. We have two treatments - undrilled patches and wide spaced rows. These treatments have been swapped between the same group of fields that were used last season. Using the same fields means that we work within the same area that is attractive to skylarks.
By swapping the treatments we can discover if the skylarks are responding to the specific way that the crop was sown rather than the general attractiveness of the area. By the end of the month the wheat was fully emerged and a number of local farmers have remarked on the difference between the wheat fields.
Over this winter we will again be providing additional food for seed eating birds such as finches and buntings. As last year we are spreading wheat and rapeseed along one edge of a field and have an area of crop that has been sown and left unharvested. This includes kale in its second year.
New for this winter are a series of stubble strips containing weed rich patches. These are from our weed trial plots created to inform us what weeds we can germinate from the natural seedbank, how this weed population changes with herbicide inputs and which birds make use of this food source.
We are keeping a close watch on these areas through the winter and will seek to relate feeding bird numbers to the available seed supply. We will use this information to help develop ways of managing wheat crops to produce additional food for birds without reducing farm profitability.
The wheat that had been harvested from these trial plots was stored separately to our main crop and two tonnes of it have gone to the Ouse Washes nature reserve for distribution around farms in the Fens where we are providing winter feed for tree sparrows.
The sheep that had been grazing our largest paddock since the hay was cut in summer were moved off in late October as they had done their job reducing the late season growth of grass and the ground was starting to become wet and in danger of being cut up.
Birds and biodiversity
This two months covers the change in the seasons with a consequent change over in the bird population. Some summer visitors were hanging on, there were birds passing through on their way south and winter visitors arriving from the north.
The result is quite a variety of birds - 66 species have been seen on or flying over the farmland in the last two months. Our last swallow sighting was on 18 October when one was feeding around the sheep in our largest paddock. Red admiral butterflies were still being seen at the end of October. There were several sightings of buzzard, an indication of its steady colonisation of Cambridgeshire.
Our annual sighting of merlin occurred in mid October. Its appearance usually co-incides with the autumn passage of skylark or meadow pipit. Our whole farm bird count at the same time found just over 70 skylarks, a further indication that autumn passage was occurring.
Other migrants included wheatear, stonechat and whinchat. The first redwing were seen on 8 October, a flock of 70. Other autumn visitors included small flocks of lapwing and golden plover passing over. There was a welcome resighting of a lesser spotted woodpecker after a gap of two years.
We have been seeking to build up a population of seedeating birds wintering at the farm there were precious few when we first arrived. Our wild bird cover crop of kale attracted up to 70 greenfinches in September with numbers falling in October. Chaffinch numbers here stayed constant at around 25 and a few linnets were attracted in this is a new feature.
Where we are feeding wheat and rapeseed small numbers of chaffinches have been attracted. If bird usage follows the pattern of last winter we might expect the numbers on the wildbird cover to decline and the use of feeding site to increase, particularly if we have some very cold spells.
The set-aside strips containing our weed assessment plots have had a flock of up to 50 yellowhammers feeding on them, with less than ten each of linnet and reed bunting. Fifteen of these yellowhammers have had individual combinations of small colour rings placed on their legs. The potential of future resightings will tell us how many of these birds breed locally.