Posted on behalf of Georgina Bray, Hope Farm Assistant Manager
We have entered Spring for 2017, a fresh start, and possibly the most exciting time of year. Our spring barley has recently been drilled, T1 applied to the winter wheat which is looking remarkably good and the patchy oilseed rape crop is in bloom. New migrants are arriving every week. Some, such as the ring ouzels and redstarts, have flown vast distances across the globe to be welcomed with open arms. We are also finding the ever more obvious signs of new life, with territories established, nests prepared, and even the first eggs laid. Last but not least, we are celebrating another successful year of winter counts to demonstrate how well farming and wildlife conservation can coexist. With so much going on at the farm, the bees aren’t the only thing causing a buzz amongst the farming conservation team.
Just last week, we heard the first swallow, serving to remind us of the soaring forked tails that will cut across our skies for another summer and the chicks that decorate our barns! Our starlings have started to fill the nest boxes not just with nest material, but with eggs that should hatch in only a matter of days. With an incredible increase in starling numbers from 3 breeding pairs in 2001 to 15 breeding pairs in 2015, we really are reaping the benefits of the work that everyone who helps us run and manage Hope Farm puts in to provide food, habitat, and careful monitoring to measure the success of our efforts.
Image: rspb-images.com
As well as a flurry of bird activity, we are starting to see many more insects around the farm, pollinating the early-blooming flowers and making the most of the spots of sunshine. Our thick hedgerows are full of blackthorn blossom, providing valuable resources for our pollinators, and nesting cover for our birds. Most vividly across our agricultural landscape, we are also seeing a flash of yellow in the oilseed rape fields, coming into flower this month. The oilseed rape is not only a fantastic provider of rich seed for oil, but of early flowers for the pollinators, cover for nesting birds, and food for birds like linnet seen en masse across the farm.
So spring is in full swing, but that is not the only thing for us to be excited about. In February, we finished our winter bird counts that start each year in December, and once again, we have shown that the wildlife is benefiting no end from our work on this farm. This winter, we counted 1362% more birds wintering on the farm compared to the baseline created in 2001 (graph 1). Similarly, almost all of the key farmland birds have increased considerably since we bought Hope Farm (graph 2).
Graph 1: Increase in farmland birds, calculated using the winter counts from December, January and February each winter since 2000/01. The dashed line represents a baseline, taken from the 2000/2001 winter bird counts. The red line shows the trend of farmland birds counted to provide a winter bird index each year.
Graph 2: difference in maximum winter farmland bird counts between the 2000/01 winter and 2016/17 winter.
Recognising our success in conserving the birds at Hope farm is brilliant, understanding why we have been so successful here is equally, if not more important. Thankfully, the answer to that is really quite simple, we provide plenty of good quality food, seed and invertebrate-wise, and we provide plenty of habitats required for cover to help avoid predators.
Wild bird seed and crops are an essential component of food availability over winter, and our wild bird seed, provided to us by Oakbank, is of an exceptional standard. We have a mixture of 11 different seeds in our wild bird seed areas, covering 2.2% of our crop area under the agri-environment scheme. This means we can provide a variety of food to suit a variety of birds all through the winter months where food may be sparse elsewhere. The seed is particularly important for birds like the grey partridge, whose population fell across the UK by 92% between 1970 and 2016. Bucking trends like is something that we strive for, so increasing our grey partridge max counts in winter from 0 to 51 individuals since farming here has been fantastic.
Invertebrates are important for species that do not rely so much on the winter bird seed for food, such as the jackdaws, lapwings, starlings, and rooks. To support invertebrates living in the ground and on the surface of soils, you need plenty of organic matter in the soil. Unfortunately, in the last half century UK soil health has declined. With less suitable soil habitat comes fewer invertebrates, and a decrease in the availability of food for invertebrate-eating birds. At Hope Farm we have started to address these issues, to restore the soil quality and increase the sustainability of arable farming, whilst helping our birds out too.
Cover crops, adding green compost to some fields, animal grazing, and maintenance of our margins under agri-environment have been crucial to ensure an abundance of food for our invertebrate-eating birds. For a long time we have maintained margins left out of production, and the soil quality in these areas has been much better compared to the cropping fields. These margins have been able to naturally develop into well-aerated and well-nourished soils, through the promotion of delicate and complex root systems, and the cycling of nutrients to boost organic matter in these areas.
We have also introduced cover crops, and experimented with the use of green compost since 2015, to increase organic matter in the soil. This has the potential to benefit crop yields and improve soil quality to support soil dwelling fauna.
Spring sown crops have increased in abundance, particularly in recent years, as part of the black grass battle in east of England. This has meant that the arable land has become much more attractive to ground nesting birds, like the lapwings in our fields. These sorts of changes to farmland management have taken a lot of time and effort for our contractors on the farm, so thank you for all your help – it really has paid off.
Lastly, a quick introduction. I am Georgina Bray, and I am the new Assistant Farm Manager at Hope Farm. I am currently completing a Masters degree in Zoology at the University of Nottingham, and have grown up on an arable farm in Essex. So naturally, I feel like the cat that’s got the cream in landing such a job with the RSPB!
Both conservation and farming are close to my heart. I have been working a few weeks now, and with my days alternating between learning how Hope Farm works, breeding bird monitoring, and organising Open Farm Sunday in June, I have loved every minute so far. You should hear a lot more from me in the future, and will see me around the farm if you would like to pay us a visit.