Month: June 2013

Case Study: A farmland bird package on limestone soils

Posted on by Kathryn Smith

Author: Jeff Platts
Farm: Hazelmere Farm, Creswell, Derbyshire

Aims:

To provide summer insect food and seed food over winter for seed-eating birds, particularly targeting grey partridges and tree sparrows, and to provide suitable nesting habitat for lapwings on the arable land.

Management:

Hazelmere farm (270 acres) has been in the family for over 75 years, and is leased from Chatsworth Estates. I took the decision to leave dairying five years ago, and now the business concentrates on arable, with a livery and rural skills school on site.

Wild bird seed mix plots

To provide winter food for the seed eating birds on his land, I have included several plots of wild bird seed mix which have done very well on the free-draining, limestone based soil. The mix includes phacelia, kale, quinoa, millet and triticale with a handful of sunflowers also thrown in. The wild bird seed mix is re-established every other year and the land is prepared and drilled as if it is a normal crop. I occasionally get an infestation of flea beetle on the kale so a pesticide is used. A small amount of fertiliser is added to maintain nitrogen levels. The plots where the wild bird seed mix have been established were chosen to complement the adjacent land use such as hedges and margins with recognised bird populations.

The wild bird seed mixes have worked so well, I’m looking at re-sowing only one of them this year with the possibility of adding perhaps an additional row of quinoa or millet alongside another of the plots. The kale is showing through in this second year along with a reasonable amount of fat-hen which will also provide a good seed source.

Fallow plots

I have also included rotational fallow plots - it has proved very successful in encouraging lapwings to breed on the farm and I estimate there are slightly more than 20 breeding pairs. I’ve also seen flocks of up to 80 lapwings using the plots in the late summer.

Across the farm there are 51ha left as over-wintered stubbles after a spring cereal and, on average, 10ha are then sprayed off at the end of March and left as fallow after running over them with a light disc to break up the surface.

In the autumn, as long as there is no major weed cover showing, a single run with the cultivator or a light set of discs creates a suitable till and the cereal is then drilled.

There have been some issues with sterile brome on the fallow plot. After discussion with Natural England, the plot was left fallow all year including over winter and then cleaned up with a stale seed bed with a supplementary treatment with Roundup before being sown with another spring cereal this year.

Flower-rich margins

I’m currently looking at adding some additional floristically enhanced margins for grey partridge around some fields to increase foraging and breeding habitat. This will also benefit a wide range of insects, and other birds on the farm which feed their chicks on insects.

Achievements

Collectively, the wild bird seed mixtures, floristically-enhanced margins and fallow plots will provide an ideal package for farmland birds, giving the key requirements of winter seed food, summer insect food and in-field nesting habitat for ground-nesting birds, respectively.

The birds on the farm were surveyed in 2009 as part of the RSPB’s Volunteer & Farmer Alliance scheme. The survey picked up nine red list species of high conservation concern, including grey partridges and lapwings, and thirteen bird species of medium conservation concern, including bullfinches and reed buntings.

Of these, the density of lapwings recorded on the farm during the summer and autumn are testament to the benefits of fallow plots to this species with the number of lapwings breeding on the farm having increased since the adoption of this measure. It also provides a winter food source for those lapwings which over-winter in the area.

A large flock of around thirty tree sparrows were seen feeding on one block of wild bird seed mix and two of the blocks were sheltering coveys of grey partridge last autumn.

The wild bird seed mix plots are also magnets for hundreds of invertebrates including bees and butterflies.

The floristically enhanced margins will plug the final gap in farmland bird requirements by ensuring that there are insect-rich foraging areas.

Case Study: Cultivated margins

Posted on by Kathryn Smith

 

Author: Nicholas Watts
Farm: Vine House Farm, Lincolnshire

Aims:

The aim was to create an insect-rich foraging habitat for farmland birds. I farm on fertile peat soils, so effective control of pernicious weeds is essential.

Management:

I started using this option 5 years ago. For the first four years, I cultivated annually in the spring. Blackgrass is hit by spring cultivations and the seed is short-lived, so successive spring cultivations along with lack of fertiliser have virtually eliminated it.

This year, I applied a herbicide in March to control grass weeds instead of cultivating. This has the advantages of providing seed food for birds through the ‘hungry gap’ (January – April inclusive), providing pollen and nectar throughout the spring, and I think that the plant diversity has increased as a result. It has taken me 4 or 5 years to get the margins to produce food in the lean time of year, because of the need for annual spring cultivations to get on top of the blackgrass. If someone has no blackgrass then an early spring food source can be produced in year two or three. In future, I may only cultivate in alternate years and use herbicide in the 2nd year.

Creeping thistle is a major concern with potatoes and sugar beet in the rotation, so I spot spray thistles with a knapsack sprayer. This has reduced the thistle numbers over time. I had to spot-spray some areas to remove couch and field bindweed with a boom sprayer at harvest time, when the annuals were dormant.

Achievements:

The floristic diversity of these margins is unparalleled by any other habitat on the farm. Plant species richness per margin varies from 55 to 70 species, almost an order of magnitude greater than my wild flower margins, and even more impressive compared with my grass margins, ditch banks and hedgerows.

In years when the spring cultivation is not required, it delivers pollen and nectar throughout the year as well as any sown mixture. Red dead-nettle feeds bumblebees in March and a progression of a wide range of flowers take over from then onwards. When spring cultivation is undertaken, these margins provide pollen and nectar from June onwards.

The full range of farmland birds forage for insects in these margins: grey partridges, linnets, reed buntings, corn buntings and even quail. Turtle doves are scarce on the farm now: common sense suggests that they should use them as a source of seed food too, but I have not been able to witness this. I now have ten times the density of linnets feeding on this farm compared with neighbouring farms. I put this down to the availability of seeds in these margins. I think that the accessibility to the ground in combination with the abundance of insects (and seeds in the case of linnets) provides the ideal conditions for foraging birds.

The combination of spring cultivations, use of selective herbicide and spot-spraying have effectively controlled all of the noxious weed problems. Uncropped cultivated margins are more work than grass margins, but less than some of the other arable options, such as wild bird seed mixtures.

http://www.vinehousefarm.co.uk

Case Study: Skylark Plots

Posted on by Kathryn Smith

Author: Ian Dillon
Farm: Grange Farm, Cambridgeshire

Aims:

We include two skylark plots per hectare in all winter cereal fields on the farm as an easy means of supporting skylark numbers on the farm.

Management:

In 2009, we trialled spraying out the plots, and found that they worked successfully for skylarks provided that they were sprayed before the end of December. From 2013 this will be the preferred way of creating them, as our contractor has changed to an 18m drill and is less able to create plots when drilling. It also means that the plots are exactly 4m x 4m and so we are taking less land out of production. The plots are sprayed out using a 36m boom sprayer which is pre-programmed to spray out the plots at specified locations within the fields.

Achievements:

The plots work extremely well for us, increasing skylark territories from 10 in 2000 to 43 in 2012. We have good crop yields (9 t/ha for winter wheat and 3.2/ha for oilseed rape), having been doing skylark plots for 12 years now.

Skylark numbers have increased by over 400% on the farm in the last 13 years, against a backdrop of continued decline in the East of England as a whole. Monitoring nesting success in the first three years of using skylark plots showed that the number of nesting pairs in fields with plots increased and the number of chicks that each pair rears also increased.

Image: Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)

Case Study: Wild flower margins

Posted on by Kathryn Smith

Author: Nicholas Watts
Farm: Vine House Farm, Lincolnshire

Aims:

The aim was to boost insect food for farmland birds through the summer. The farm is on peat soils in the Lincolnshire Fens.

Management:

The first margins were established 15 years ago. A wild flower and grass mix was purchased from Emorsgate Seeds. The seed mixture was 20% wild flowers and 80% fine grasses. Wildflowers included yarrow, common knapweed, wild carrot, lady’s bedstraw, self-heal, meadow buttercup, common sorrel and red campion. In addition, some flowering plants that were not in the original seed mix have established from the seed bank.

We cut them for hay in early August, as we have a market for it. Cutting and removing is important to reduce the fertility and maintain the floristic diversity. In addition, I have applied a herbicide in the spring whenever I have considered that coarse grasses were becoming a problem in the previous summer. One margin was sprayed this year for the first time in 7 years. I also pull ragwort and spot-spray thistles with a knapsack sprayer.

Achievements:

Although the floristic diversity of the original mix has declined, they remain as diverse flower margins absolutely humming with insect life. Knapweed has not survived in some of the mixtures on the acid soils. Our 15-year-old margin still retains mallow, sorrel, wild carrot, buttercup, lady’s bedstraw and self-heal. Yarrow has remained particularly dominant. In one margin, we incorporated cowslip and betony, but these did not appear in the sward until 5 years and 8 years after sowing, respectively.

The range of birds that use them has disappointed me. They are used by skylarks, meadow pipits and linnets (which take the sorrel seeds), but apparently not by my corn buntings and other small passerines. It may be that they are too dense for them. As a result, I have tried uncropped cultivated margins as an alternative means of providing an insect-rich foraging habitat for birds.

I feel that they are a significantly better option for wildlife than the standard grass margins.

http://www.vinehousefarm.co.uk/