Post from Georgie Bray, Hope Farm manager
Tune into Countryfile this Sunday to find out how Hope Farm uses simple solutions to tackle a landscape scale problem for winter farmland bird survival... you don't want to miss it!
Combatting the cold
At this time of year, food availability (or lack of it) is the largest pressure on farmland bird populations as they require so much more energy in the colder months. Fortunately, at Hope Farm and a other nature-friendly farms across the country, farmers are feeding the birds over winter on an industrial scale to keep winter survival up and help farmland birds on their way to recovery.
Filming at RSPB Hope Farm. Image: Georgie Bray
There's always hope
At Hope Farm, we also undertake stringent winter surveys that provide the proof in a very tasty pudding! With the tweaks that we have made to our management of the farm in winter, we have increased our winter farmland bird index by an incredible 1739%.
To find out what we are doing on the farm and how we gather the evidence to support the use of these practices on a wider scale, catch us on Countryfile at 6pm this Sunday (13 January) on BBC One.
The awesome work of the RSPB Dungeness team also features in this episode too.