COMMUNICATING RESEARCH - FARMER-LED CONSERVATION |
NIA Tree Sparrow villages
GWCT Partridge Count Scheme
Northamptonshire cluster farm
The Marlborough Downs NIA has put up nesting boxes in small groups for tree sparrows as they like to nest in loose colonies. Farmers grow nearby areas of insect-rich flowers and plant lots of shrubs and small trees to provide foraging areas. This all has to be established within a maximum of 600 metres from the nesting boxes, because this is as far as the adults want to fly to forage for food. This work is paying off as last summer there were 142 pairs of tree sparrows nesting in the North Wiltshire Downs, and 72 of those pairs were using the boxes and raised 397 chicks. The NIA pays for the nest boxes and also the supplementary grain that the farmers will use to ensure that the sparrows have plenty to eat through the hungry gap.
Our Partridge Count Scheme has been running since 1933 and is the largest farmer-led volunteer count scheme in Europe. We believe that the best way to ensure the future of wild grey partridges rests with farmers effectively managing their land to benefit the birds. Counting them twice a year is vital to determine the success of their efforts and we offer free advice and help to farms wishing to get involved. Despite Government figures showing a continuing decline in farmland birds, many species are thriving on farms taking part in the scheme, with 24% more songbirds counted and on average five more species recorded per farm than on farms with no management for partridges.
www.mdnia.org.uk
www.gwct.org.uk/pcs
One of the pilot cluster areas is based around Mears Ashby, where nine farmers have come together covering 4,000 hectares in total. It is likely that this part of Northamptonshire will not feature as a target area within the new Stewardship scheme as it does not harbour an outstanding array of ‘wanted’ species. However, it is clearly apparent that there is a wonderful selection of habitats and species to be found in this area. By working together across this wider landscape rather than on individual farms, the group could quickly see that there might well be some substantial benefits from joining forces to manage not just wildlife, but soil and water too. Also, farmers will have a better chance of gaining Stewardship payments in the future.
then left largely to their own devices, with little or no feedback. However, as cluster farmers they congregate to discuss working together, look at a map of their locality to see how best to link their habitats up across farm boundaries and talk about the different species they feel are important in their area. Money is vital to help fund this conservation work on the ground, but it is not just money that gets results. Having created the four cluster farm pilot areas, other farmers have heard about the initiative and have approached us to set up their own. Farmers in the Avon Valley, near to our headquarters in Hampshire, have problems with water levels and grazing regimes, and are also acutely aware of the demise of lapwings, snipe and redshank within the valley. Making changes to tackle these problems as individuals is almost impossible, but as a group who knows what can be achieved? It is, of course, early days, but farmers do genuinely appear to be motivated by this bottom-up approach. Because three quarters of Britain is farmland, working closely with them is absolutely key to future success for wildlife recovery.
These schemes could ensure that corn marigolds, turtle doves, barn owls and shepherd’s needle don’t disappear from our countryside. © Peter Thompson/ GWCT
© Dave Kjaer
‘bottom up’ project with farmers themselves, working alongside conservationists, deciding how and what they are going to do. Looking to the future, we can see that there will be less funding available for conservation work and it will also be more targeted to certain areas. So what happens to other less favoured areas, and can we use this limited funding more wisely on the ground? We have spent a lot of time thinking about these questions and have written a report for Natural England, which proposed that this bottom-up approach, coupled with getting individual farmers to work more closely with their neighbours, could well result in a more coherent, joined-up, landscape-scale conservation management plan. Natural England could also see the sense behind this thinking and gave us a small amount of funding to pilot this idea in four different areas. Although ‘cluster farms’, as this pilot scheme has become known, are in their early stages, what has already become clearly apparent is that farmers welcome this approach. So often they have been told what to do and
www.gwct.org.uk
GAME & WILDLIFE REVIEW 2013 | 15