Spring/summer 2003

Crop and estate management

The dry weather (with cold nights in spring) persisted from February largely without respite through the summer. The result was slow development of the crops, reduced grain-fill but a very early, easy and rapid harvest.

The dryness favoured the limited spring cultivation that we carried out prior to sowing some new grass margins and the resowing of the wild bird cover crops. It may have been easy to get these spring sown crops into the ground but the lack of rain slowed germination and subsequent growth.

The triticale in the wild bird cover withstood this drought well and produced many well filled heads but the young grasses in the sown margins were brown and crisp by August. Hopefully with autumn rains these will pick up very rapidly.

Our post harvest cultivations are aimed at disturbing the surface to create a stale seed bed within which weeds, particularly blackgrass, might germinate. The lack of moisture has meant that this technique just hasn't worked this year and once rains come we might expect a large flush of weeds to coincide with crop emergence, making grass weed control a real challenge this autumn.

Birds and biodiversity

In early spring, before nesting had commenced, our counts of singing male skylarks varied between 15 and 19 birds across the farm. Numbers rose into April and our final territory count taken across the whole nesting season was 27 territories. This is a continuing year-on-year increase based on a consistent survey each year - the previous three years' territory counts were 10, 18 and 24 territories.

Most significant was that there were only 10 territories in 2000 when the crops were distributed in the same fields as this year. The first nests were found in the oilseed rape fields while the crop was still short. As it grew too tall and the wheat became more suitable we found the nests in this crop. Later nesting attempts were concentrated in the fields with the undrilled patches and wide spaced rows as we had hoped.

Other birds that fared well were yellowhammers - the increase recorded over the period 2000-2002 was held with 18 territories found again - and linnets which increased again in 2003 to 16 territories.

Not such positive news was that we were unable to prove that any of the grey partridges reared young on the farm after three males were seen, sometimes with females, to the end of May. Also disappointing have been the losses of some other breeding birds. An absence of cuckoo reflects a national downturn but the loss of little owl must be a local effect.

Sedge warblers bred in the oilseed rape this year, a new breeding species. New species seen flying over the farm were a short-eared owl in spring, presumably a migrant moving north to its upland breeding grounds and a redshank in late summer doing the reverse journey. The species count for the farm (including fly-overs) now stands at 99.