GWCT News Blog

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.

The original blog we wrote has, not surprisingly, generated some comment, particularly with respect to the suggestion of a derogation on its use on kale in wild bird cover.

Protecting an area for a species works in theory, however, that does not mean they will go there!