Its been a while since the last blog, so I am afraid this one is going to be rather fact laden to give you a fuller flavour of how our work to give nature a home here is going. The end of season highlights have been a peak pre-migration roost of 16 stone-curlews, and an unusually late pair of stone-curlew with chicks well into October, a covey of 13 grey partridge, and 4 red kites together. Ring ouzel has been the pick of autumn passage with good numbers of whinchats and stonechats. Finch and bunting numbers are beginning to build with a flock of several hundred linnet on wild bird mixtures at the end of the year. The 5 yearly Common Bird Census undertaken by Nick Adams confirmed a consolidation of at least 5 pairs of stone curlews nesting every year since 2011. A total of 759 territories of 52 species were mapped including 9 red-listed and 9 amber-listed species. This is an increase of 70 territories and 5 species on the CBC survey of 2011 (689 territories of 47 species). The red-listed species were grey partridge (3 territories), lapwing (18 territories), skylark (74 territories), song thrush (10 territories), mistle thrush (4 territories), starling (3 territories), linnet (18 territories), yellowhammer (33 territories) and corn bunting (16 territories), in total there has been an increase of 78 territories of red-listed species since 2011.
This has been RSPB's tenth year at Winterbourne Downs and a major milestone in the development of the reserve has been reached in 2016. Our last harvest of cereals took place in August. Farm Manager, Brian Eley, then used the combine harvester to collect wildflower seeds from our own grasslands at Winterbourne Downs. This was mixed with seed brush-harvested from the flower rich chalk grasslands of Salisbury Plain, funded by the HLS capital works plan, the HLF “Save Our Magnificent Meadows” project and the Viridor Credits “Restoring Wiltshire’s Historic Chalk Grassland Landscape” project. This mixture was then sown onto the 26 ha of former arable fields. The area of arable reversion to chalk grassland has now reached 180 ha, with a further 22 ha of grassland floristically enhanced using the “green hay” technique. We now have over 200 ha of flower-rich calcareous grassland creation in progress. This has meant that we have now moved to a largely livestock-based farming system and although we no longer grow commercial food crops, to provide for the greatest variety of farmland wildlife these flower-rich grasslands are combined with the cultivated habitats of ground nesting bird plots, wild bird seed mixtures and arable plant margins.
To see how wildlife is responding to the creation of flower-rich grasslands an invertebrate survey was commissioned. Consultant entomologist Bryan Pinchen recorded 3 Nationally Rare (Red Data Book), 16 Nationally Scarce and 5 BAP Priority BAP species during his 2016 surveys. Previously recorded priority BAP species brown hairstreak, small blue, hornet robberfly and brown banded carder bee were all refound during his 2016 survey, a new bumblebee Bombus ruderatus, and a notable change has been massive change in distribution of the RDB robberfly species Machinus rusticus, This was recorded as a singleton from a grass margin in 2007, has since made a spectacular colonisation of the reserves reversion grasslands. The small blue butterfly Cupido minimus has responded to the profusion of kidney vetch in the newly created chalk grasslands with an amazing emergence of thousands of small blue butterflies around the reserve this summer.
In the New Year there will be an update about new features on the nature trail to explore next year....