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| Wildflower margin in the summer |
With a
few patches of Snowdrops around the estate signalling (we hope) the start of
Spring, we welcomed Mr Hadley and an eager group of Year 4 pupils from Wells Primary School to help us
complete the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust Big Farmland Bird Count.
This important piece of citizen science has been running for three years now
and aims to highlight the good work done by farmers and gamekeepers in helping
to reverse the decline in farmland bird numbers. Sue and I had selected two
different sites to survey, which each offered an expansive view of farmland as
well as a selection of different features such as grass margins, field trees
and hedgerows. If only the count was conducted in the summer months!
On
arrival we ran through a selection of birds that we were likely to see and
looked closely at their key identification features. There followed a quick
lesson in binocular skills and we were lucky that a mixed group of birds
including Greylag Geese, Coot, Egyptian Geese and a bonus pair of Barnacle
Geese had chosen the nearby cricket pitch as their morning hang-out zone. They
posed beautifully for us and, having honed our field skills, we set off to our
first survey site, clipboards and binoculars in hands.
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Brown hare
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Site 1
gave us a fantastic view of a large, newly ploughed field and several clumps of
field trees which led on to a winter wheat field and the distant back of the
Hall. The wind was gusting icy blasts but our intrepid citizen scientists soon
got down to spotting, identifying, counting and recording the birds that had
braved the bitter weather. First off were 15 Common Gulls, a small gaggle of 5 Greylag Geese and large groups of Woodpigeon and Lapwing,
who were feeding in the amongst the winter wheat. Single Herring and Black Headed
Gulls joined the party before we were treated to a double raptor hit of a
swooping Kestrel and a soaring Buzzard. Despite having fingers that
were numbed to the bone, the plucky Year 4s also noted weather conditions and
physical land features and were lucky enough to spot some wonderfully camouflaged Brown Hares before we headed off to Site 2, by the pheasant pens and
bio-mass storage areas.
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Buzzard
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We
hunkered down as best we could in the dip between fields and once more clamped
binoculars to eyes. A gorgeous Buzzard appeared
above the large tree clump and cover crop zone, treating pupils to really good
views before it spooked large flocks of around 30 Woodpigeons and 40 Lapwings.
It was especially nice to see so many
Lapwings around the farmland as these birds have been really struggling in
recent years. It was feeling almost like an Arctic expedition now, so we
retreated to the warmth of the mini-bus to finish our survey and managed to add
Carrion Crow, Herring Gull and Jackdaw
to the species list.
With
birds counted and fingers thawed it was time for the Year 4s to head back to
school to share their new ornithological knowledge and to upload their survey
results to the GWCT website. These citizen science projects are playing an
increasingly important role in developing conservation methods and we were all
very pleased to have played our part.
