GWCT News Blog

1 May marked the start of 2024’s No Mow May. This campaign, initiated by the conservation organisation Plantlife, encourages us not to mow our lawns during May as a way of supporting not only our country’s flora, but the wildlife that relies on it – particularly pollinators such as bees.

Over the last few weeks, the Scottish Lowlands team has been busy completing the tenth year of spring grey partridge pair surveys on Balgonie farm.

Historically, Scottish agri-environmental schemes have found it difficult to find a balance between establishing measures for biodiversity and ensuring that the system itself works for farmers.

It’s been a busy start to the new year for the Scottish Lowlands research team. We’ve spent the last few weeks setting up gamebird feeders to carry out research into supplementary winter feeding for farmland birds.

Many parts of the English rolling landscape are criss-crossed by hedgerows, which if one stops and looks provide an interesting perspective on the history of the landscape being observed.

This October, the GWCT’s Head of Wildlife Recovery Dr Francis Buner, accompanied by placement student Jasmine Canham, was invited to give a keynote presentation on grey partridge conservation in Europe, on the occasion of the national launch event for a German-wide grey partridge recovery project called ‘Rebhuhn retten – Vielfalt fördern!’ (‘Save the grey partridge – Promote biodiversity!’).

The GWCT is delighted that the headline of the EFRA report following its soil health inquiry is that government should take soil health as seriously as it does our other critical assets of water and air.

At its heart, FRAMEwork is about sharing ideas, inspiring new approaches, and collaborating to make farmland biodiversity conservation possible on the ground. This occurred in March when the GWCT team hosted the projects’ annual meeting.

When you think of the GWCT, images of pheasants, partridges, and maybe even lapwings come to mind. But there’s something we deeply care about that might surprise you: soil.

Supplementary feeding has become a widespread management tool for declining farmland birds. In the countryside in late winter there is often not enough natural seed food, which causes a hungry gap between February and April when lots of birds die of starvation.