Don’t you find that the world always seems better when you’re out in the fresh air, enjoying the steady arrival of spring?
We outdoor types on the Eastern England farmland advisory team certainly think so.
Looking at various winged things with RSPB and Buglife farmland bods
Happily this week we had chance to visit one of our favourite farms, meet up with some colleagues from Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, and learn more about the ‘Small Things that Run the World’.
By that I thankfully don’t mean Little Mix, at least not yet.
I mean the myriad millions of creeping, crawling, fluttering critters that keep intricate webs of food, water and nutrients moving in our countryside and play such an essential role in its health.
Things like the Large Garden Bumblebee – a threatened bee to which the Fens area is very important. It nests underground in rodent burrows in open habitat, and forages at deep flowers, particularly red clover and water mint, found in many fen ditches. It has suffered mainly due lack of flowers, loss of nesting habitat and insecticide exposure.
But a good clover-rich nectar flower mix next to a rotationally managed ditch and a grass margin where field mice can burrow is easily achievable in an Environmental Stewardship agreement and ticks a lot of boxes for this bee, which forms part of an army of pollinating insects worth £440M annually to the UK economy.
Things like the Necklace Ground Beetle – a declining farmland beetle. It is flightless and lives in leaf litter on the soil surface. It has suffered because of increased autumn cultivations which kill the larvae and prey, as do insecticides, and from loss of refuges like hedgerows.
But a beetle bank or rotationally managed hedgerow near fields containing weedy overwintered stubbles left fallow all summer is easily achievable in an ELS agreement and can make all the difference to this beetle and hordes of others like it, which if able to flourish, spend their entire juvenile and adult lives munching through pests.
So have you spotted how well this fits into our recurring theme? If you’re doing the Farmland Bird Package through Environmental Stewardship, providing insect-rich habitat, winter seed food and nesting habitat – through things like flower mixes, stubbles and summer fallows - then you’ll also giving a boost to all our precious pollinators, pest-controllers and poo-recyclers too.
So it turns out us at the RSPB and our friends at Buglife have lots of Little Things in common.
Do you? Tell us about the Small Things helping to run your farm.....
Essex Frank, Fens Niki, V&FA Emily, EERO Alison, Gaffer Simon and the brilliant Richard and Vicky from Buglife.