GWCT News Blog

Conservation is sometimes misunderstood as being all about wildlife. The reality is that conservation doesn’t operate in a vacuum, away from the human world. Pristine wilderness rarely needs our meddling, unless those very wildernesses are themselves threatened by us.

According to the Curlew Recovery Partnership, around two thirds of all curlew pairs breeding in the English lowlands occupy agricultural grassland habitats affected by seasonal grass-cutting.

Here is a crucial point to understand; whatever the predator, how many you nail is not the measure of success. The key question is how much predation are you stopping?

The GWCT and BASC have teamed up again to deliver a course designed to improve best practice on DIY shoots and farm shoots. The course is aimed at shoot captains, syndicate members and anyone that manages their own small shoot.

On the evening of Monday 4th April, the newly formed GWCT South West Wales Committee held their first event courtesy of Dr Nick Fox and the Beavis Trust to visit their conservation focused 300-acre farm near Carmarthen and their lakes which are home to a beaver population.

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Aim to Sustain have published a letter of response to the open letter written by the RSPB and WWT in which they called for a ban on the use of lead ammunition.

The GWCT is calling for volunteers to count ‘roding’ woodcock this spring. Potential surveyors are required to conduct two to four dusk surveys between now and 1 July, then enter their count data online. Recognising the male woodcock’s distinctive roding flights is relatively easy, and a great way to observe this otherwise shy species.

The GWCT’s Wetland research team runs two long-term woodcock ringing studies, one in Hampshire and one in Cornwall, where we ring a sample of woodcock each winter and record re-encounters with ringed individuals over subsequent years. 

Watch GWCT advisor Jess Brooks and her family describe their experiences of the Sustainable Farming Incentive on their Isle of Wight farm.