Help the birds – resist the tyranny of the tidy hedge
Patrick Barkham, Monday 1 August 2016.
Though farmers are annoyed by the environment department’s hedge-cutting restrictions, they help our later-nesting birds
Blackbirds are among the birds benefiting from a month-long extension of the farmland hedge-cutting ban. Photograph: Mike Lane/Alamy
My garden hedge is full of empty nests. The blackbirds have fledged, twice, and so have the dunnocks. Successfully fending off sparrowhawks and cats, their exhausted parents are now enjoying a well-earned holiday. In the fields beyond our home, though, parents still slave away, feeding baby bullfinches, linnets and yellowhammers tucked in the hedges that grace our countryside.
As well as the usual predators, every August these declining species have had to fend off another ravenous monster: the hedge-trimmer. This summer and last, however, the cutting machines are silent because the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has taken an excellent, science-led policy decision: to protect these birds by extending the farmland hedge-cutting ban by a month, to 31 August.
This ban is not responsible for the overgrown lanes vexing rural holidaymakers, because roadside hedges can still be cut for safety reasons (blame austerity for wild roadsides), but it is vexing many farmers. August is a convenient time for hedge-cutting because the ground is dry and the work doesn’t obstruct more important tasks, such as sowing crops.
The science, however, is unequivocal: more than 40,000 nesting records collected by volunteers for the British Trust for Ornithology prove that finches and buntings nest through August. Ground-nesting skylarks and corn buntings are also destroyed by hedge-cutters driving along field margins.
As farmers press to repeal the ban, the wildlife campaigner Mark Avery says its survival will be a test of both the new Defra secretary, Andrea Leadsom, and whether we are in danger of slipping into a post-science era of countryside management.
I hope this wild-hedged August will show farmers that they can save money by cutting back on contractors and help birds, insects and mammals. We need to escape the tyranny of the tidy hedge.