GWCT News Blog

With the shooting season now over, the first signs of breeding are already upon us. So, those who hope for a significant contribution from wild bred game should be making a start on the spring predation control programme.

The announcement of the Landscape Recovery element of the Environmental Land Management Scheme was greeted with enthusiasm by those who advocate rewilding approaches.  

The Owl Box Initiative is supporting National Nest Box Week by highlighting the importance of providing nest boxes for a range of bird species across our landscapes. 

During the 2021 breeding season, the Owl Box Initiative’s monitoring team began box checks in May and continued, at occupied boxes, until the last chicks were ringed in October. The longer breeding season was, in part, due to a number of barn owl pairs across our study areas producing a second brood.

If you read the headlines around the recent Birds of Conservation Concern report, you’d have been rightly worried about the fate of many of our much-loved bird species.

This summer, GWCT scientists were working near Exmoor, looking at the effect that winter game crop plots may have had on breeding songbirds the subsequent spring. 

From here on in, the two most used rat poisons, bromadiolone and difenacoum will be as good as useless on my shoot, and if we were daft enough to use them, we would simply be risking sending the chemicals up the food chain to the likes of our barn owls, kestrels and red kites, while having no significant impact on the rats.

The Owl Box Initiative strives to be a conduit for collaboration and knowledge sharing between land managers, volunteers and conservation organisations, and recently, I had the honour of meeting with Major (Rtd) Nigel Lewis, a prominent volunteer ornithologist who runs the Lewis Raptor and Owl Group, based in Wiltshire.

Each development stage of a barn owl chick is crucial to increase their chances of successfully fledging, so we take this opportunity to look back at these important stages before the chicks in the Owl Box LIVE nest start to fledge.

Here are a few of our non-game research findings that you might not be aware of from the GWCT.