Reversing the declines of farmland birds: a practical demonstration.

Abstract

Numbers of breeding birds declined on farmland during the late 1970s and 1980s. The development of a management system for wild gamebirds, and its integration into a viable farming system at Loddington, Leicestershire, since 1993, have resulted in an increase of 102% in abundance of a community of nationally declining songbird species, effectively reversing their former decline. A private/public partnership, combining farmers' own incentives with state-funded agri-environment measures, could be expanded to enable farmers to apply this, or similar management systems, more widely, in order to reverse the decline of farmland bird populations.