Fat birds of the barley at RSPB’s Hope Farm. June 2016.
Hope Farm manager Ian Dillon reports on the work we’re doing to give a home to corn buntings on the farm.
Since the RSPB bought Hope Farm in 2000, we’ve had considerable success in increasing the numbers of some otherwise declining species of farmland birds.
But of all the resident farmland birds in the UK, we’ve struggled with corn buntings. Corn buntings have suffered enormous declines in recent decades, and they’re now absent from large swathes of the country.
The reasons for this seem to be different in different areas. In some places it may be a lack of food over winter. In other places it may be because nests are being destroyed through farming activities.
Elsewhere, it may be that nesting success is low due to a lack of insect food or high predation rates.
RSPB conservation scientists have been studying the reasons behind their declines in East Anglia for many years. They’ve been looking at how to improve nesting success when the corn buntings nest in the cereal crops. They’ve found that corn buntings like to nest in denser parts of the crop where there is some ground vegetation.
Often these areas occur close to field edges, where nests are at risk from predators. So we will trial deliberately planting strips of barley at double the normal density within the normal crop. These dense strips will be well away from the field edges. We’re hoping this means more nests will be successful.
Hopefully some of the corn buntings that spent the winter at Hope Farm will have stayed and will be using these experimental strips and we will have another success to report to you.