Top tips for winter

Agriculture Advice Manager Richard Winspear  provides some thoughts on things you can be doing over the winter months to support wildlife through the cold as well as planning for the year ahead.

Winter is a good season to do many tasks, but some can be constrained by weather and ground conditions. For some it is a good time to plan how to adopt or progress strategies such as Integrated Pest Management on arable systems or Integrated Parasite Management on livestock systems. Below are some top tips for helping and enjoying wildlife over the next three months:

Woodland management

Image: Farm woodland in March (c) Ben Andrew (rspb-images.com) 

This can commence in the late autumn and winter:

• opening up areas for next spring by coppicing shrubs like Hazel and widening woodland rides will benefit ground flora and the insects that feed on it
• thin dense stands within a plantation to give trees space to grow, retaining healthy, native trees but avoid removing any standing deadwood, as this is very important for some groups of invertebrates
• avoid tidying up woodland by leaving any fallen deadwood and retaining some of any felled timber as ‘habitat piles’
• You can find more advice on woodland management here

Scrub management

Open scrub habitats are also important for wildlife. Winter is a period when the scrub can be coppiced on rotation so that it is maintained as dense scrub for nesting wildlife. See more here

Pond management 

This is best done in the winter if ground conditions allow it:

• Generally ponds get overgrown and shaded and it is usually beneficial to open them up to sunlight by removing trees and shrubs particularly on the southern edge, but seek advice if they are in a semi-natural habitat (e.g native woodland or unimproved grassland) have abundant wetland plants or may contain protected species
• Create new ponds where they are scarce in the landscape: target areas of the farm where the water source is less likely to be polluted as water quality is the most important criteria for a wildlife pond
• See more on pond management here

Image: Farm pond (c) Ben Andrew (rspb-images.com) 

Hedgerow management

Remember to stop hedgerow management by 1 March to protect early nesting birds such as thrushes.

Best practice advice on rotational management, planting and more can be found here

Image: Yellowhammer in farmland hedge during winter (c) Ben Andrew (rspb-images.com)

The hungry gap

Many seed food sources such as over-winter stubbles and unharvested crop mixtures run out of seed in the winter leaving a hungry gap between January and April when natural seed sources become available again. Winter seed-eating birds can be supported through this period with supplementary feeding

Image: A flock of Yellowhammers returning to a hedgerow after feeding on the ground in winter (c) Ben Andrew (rspb-images.com)

Managing pests and parasites

Integrated Pest Management and Integrated Parasite Management is often a progressive journey that requires some time to plan and review.

A checklist of some ways to reduce your reliance on pesticides can be found here

Guidance to reduce the use of endectocides on livestock can be found here

Creating habitats for ground-nesting birds

The decline and earlier sowing of spring crops has led to the loss of nesting habitat in arable areas for Lapwings and Stone-curlews (the latter is restricted to areas in southern and eastern England). To mitigate for this, it is possible to create fallow plots under some agri-environment schemes. Guidance on how to do it is here

Image: Lapwing in the snow (c) Chris Gomersall (rspb-images.com)