Blog post by Derek Gruar, Senior Research Assistant, RSPB Centre for Conservation Science and Laurinda Lauffman, Trusts and Foundations Manager, RSPB.
We are well underway with the 19th season of breeding bird surveys and summer butterfly monitoring at RSPB Hope Farm.
Surveys started in early April and half the maximum number of 12 bird surveys by 20 May have been completed.
What have we found?
The cold spring seemed to delay the breeding season, but now things are in full swing. We have two pairs of lapwing with young chicks running around the fields, whilst the nest boxes in the orchard and paddocks are resonating to the sound of nestling starlings that are due to fledge in a week or so.
Amongst the resident farmland birds we observe regularly on our farm surveys out on the farm, we have been fortunate to find a few passage migrant species including several wheatears, two ring ouzels and a lone whinchat.
What happens on a survey?
I was joined by a colleague Laurinda Luffman, an RSPB fundraiser with trust and foundation partners, who recently came out to join the bird surveying team at Hope Farm. Here is her review of our morning survey:
“There are few things in life which would make me leave my warm bed at 4.30am, but the prospect of seeing the Farm’s abundant birdlife is one of them. And I wasn’t disappointed.
On a five-hour walk to survey the field edges around half the farm (covering approximately 90 hectares), we encountered 37 different bird species, 14 of them on the Farmland Bird Index.
The hedges were adorned by yellowhammers, linnets, reed buntings and whitethroats, with grey partridges scurrying away from our approaching footsteps. And on a glorious sunny morning, the oilseed rape fields were alive with the song of skylarks, individuals rising above the blazing yellow to dance and flutter up high.
Their song and the sight of so many other birds filled me with complete joy and showed me that a healthy, commercial farm can also be a wondrous place for our wildlife. And as if that wasn’t reward enough for my early start, we found a pair of breeding lapwing looking after their two young chicks in one of the wildflower field margins.
This allowed the farm team to ring the youngsters and gave me a close-up view of one of the cutest chicks among all our British birds. My morning on the farm was complete!”
Starling nestbox monitoring
We also undertake annual monitoring of the starling nestboxes dotted around the farm. This short video below, shows how we do it:
It's not just birds...
Some of the early season butterfly monitoring visits were postponed due to the weather conditions not reaching the minimum requirements for the national monitoring scheme.
However, on the very warm sunny days we have seen some unseasonably high numbers; with both orange-tip and brimstone being recorded in above average numbers. There is still a long way to go for the butterfly monitoring as the season lasts until late September.
What’s next?
So what can we predict for the second half of the breeding bird monitoring season? I think we will see more activity from whitethroats in the hedgerows and that skylarks’ will move into our spring sown barley fields as they continue to grow.
As for butterflies, numbers tend to reach a peak in late-June/early-July with the emergence of ringlets, meadow browns and gatekeepers. It’s at this time the field margins are at their best.
I’ll report back with the 2018 results for bird monitoring in August and again in October for Butterflies.