A weekly picture from The Oa reserve on Islay:

Farming for nature: This week we continued the cultivation of our 'bird crop' fields.  In this picture Ewan is 'discing' the field to break up the soil and prepare it for sowing a wild mustard and fodder-radish seed mix.  We sow our fields later into the year so that the crop is still standing through late autumn and doesn't go to seed too early, thus providing valuable food for birds that gather in autumn and winter.  Last winter we saw huge flocks of over 1000 twite foraging in this field, along with linnet, reed bunting, chaffinch and goldfinch that could be regularly seen and a Lapland Bunting was spotted in another of our bird crop fields last April.

Conservation is often a complicated business and preparing the bird crop fields is no exception to this rule.  In this case the major difficulty was getting the tractor and discs in and out of the field.  It seemed regardless which way you were going, the only way it was possible was backwards!

Bonus Photos:

Chough aren't traditionally regarded as agressive birds, so neither Dave or I could quite believe it when we saw a protective chough parent attack a herring gull that it evidently deemed to be too close to it's nest.  Perhaps more accurately we couldn't believe that the chough was resoundingly triumphant against a bird which, in a game of Ornithological Top Trumps, out-gunned it in almost all departments.  Chough on The Oa are evidently not a bird to be trifled with, and just to prove that point, here is another of our audacious chough tackling a golden eagle earlier this week.

On Wednesday, while conducting a survey on the reserve, we came across this beautiful marsh fritillary butterfly.  On notifying Butterfly Conservation we discovered that this is the first reported sighting of this species on the wing in Scotland in 2017.  It is also the earliest we have seen one on the reserve and interestingly we had marsh fritillary caterpillars on the same day, so this butterfly is a bit ahead of it's siblings.

If you have a picture or sighting from The Oa that you would like to share, please get in contact.