Auchnerran Blog

With the colourful days of autumn behind us, we wrapped up our annual partridge surveys, worm counts and VESS assessments, and set our sights northward. November brought us to the Scottish Demonstration Farm at Auchnerran, where we helped to tackle a long-term challenge on the farm: rabbits.

Here at Auchnerran, we’ve been actively participating in a colour ringing scheme for lapwings since 2018. Over the past few years, we’ve ringed both adult lapwings and their larger chicks, marking them with a distinctive yellow flag above their right knee. So, if you happen to spot a lapwing sporting this mark, there’s a good chance it’s one of ours!

Presenter Dougie Vipond made a visit to the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s demonstration farm in Aberdeenshire to see how their landscape-scale approach to farming and conservation is helping wader species such as lapwing, oystercatcher and curlew thrive.

Songbird feeders come in many shapes and sizes and are a common sight in gardens, filled with hundreds of different seed and grain mixes to suit a variety of birds and beak sizes. Yet despite the options available, the reality is overwinter feeding options for songbirds in farmland settings remain somewhat limited. So that is something we are aiming to change with our new songbird feeder research in Scotland.

Well, that’s everything done at our Scottish demonstration farm for another year! Another busy breeding season for the waders is winding down and coming to a close. While we had large numbers of returning birds (with a maximum pre-breeding count of 164 lapwing, larger than both the 2021 & ’22 seasons), we did have fewer nests than in previous years. 

A walk around GWSDF Auchnerran would not be complete without resident buzzards and red kites. We are lucky enough to be visited by an incredibly diverse range of raptor species, such as hen harriers, sparrowhawks and goshawks. Recently, we have witnessed a drastic increase in the number of raptors of various species observed utilising the farm, based on data from our raptor monitoring transects (conducted monthly since 2018).

The UK has long been known as a country of animal lovers, with our wildlife and countryside inspiring songs and art for centuries. However, in the UK we are also sadly one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and a number of our beloved species face declining populations for a variety of causes. This unfortunately includes our songbirds, with many species having seen a sharp decline in populations.

The capercaillie is a truly magnificent species, one that almost seems too significant and primeval to occur in the small remaining pockets of Caledonian pine forests in the 21st century. The small, declining population of this species is now centred in Strathspey, with fewer individuals occurring in Deeside and Easter Ross. This, sadly, makes observing capercaillie particularly rare in Scotland.

With the Guardian reporting declines in rabbit populations and the importance of intervention in their management, we thought it the ideal time to reflect on how they’re getting on our Scottish demonstration farm.

GWCT is working hard to help these vulnerable species. At our research and demonstration farm, Auchnerran in Aberdeenshire, we are fortunate to have thriving populations of lapwing, oystercatcher and curlew