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“Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal” - what are peatlands?
Oscar Wilde’s maxim is particularly relevant to our peatlands. Many commentators casually or deliberately interchange terms such as moorlands, peatlands and blanket bog. But just because these habitats look superficially similar, the...
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By Mike Swan, GWCT Head of Education
Once upon a time there was a bird called an Ogridge. It was the invention of the now long gone Ormsby Game Services, of Louth in Lincolnshire. A hybrid between a redleg cock and a chukar hen, it was proclaimed as the partridge of the future. These two species ...
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Back in November last year I listened to a very interesting piece broadcast on this subject as part of the BBC World Service’s Crowd Science programme. It referred to Aboriginal cultural practices of using ‘cool burning’ as a means of preventing wildfires i.e. using fire to fight fire. This migh...
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GWCT students Rosa Hicks and Piera Coleman explain why you should do the GWCT Big Farmland Bird Count in February
For the 10th year, the GWCT Big Farmland Bird Count is back, with farmers, land managers and gamekeepers taking to their fields to count some of the iconic British birds that share th...
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Jess Brooks looks deeper into the 2023 GWCT Big Farmland Bird Count data…
To recap in case you missed it, the tenth GWCT Big Farmland Bird Count (BFBC) took place in February 2023 and farmers recorded over 460,000 birds from 149 species across more than 1.5 million acres. Check out the full resu...
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Boots and sunnies on, sandwiches packed, clipboards at the ready… GWCT’s Advisors are out and about and busier than ever with biodiversity audits!
Whether it be in Devon or Norfolk, North Yorkshire or West Sussex, we’re out doing biodiversity audits on fields, whole farms and estates. These are ...
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By Henrietta Appleton, GWCT Policy Officer (England)
The Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) currently consists of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI 2023), Countryside Stewardship (mid and higher tier and soon CS-Plus) and Landscape Recovery, with the ultimate aim of replacing the e...
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Written by Fiona Torrance, Farmland Biodiversity Advisor and PepsiCo FAB project manager.
© Eric Anderson. The PepsiCo FAB project members at the 1st farm walk at Balgonie in June
As with any new venture, a project manager might have high but realistic aspirations for what they would like to ach...
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By Henrietta Appleton, Policy Officer (England)
Whilst there was much to be positive about in the recent announcement by the Defra Secretary of State on the 2024 SFI offer in terms of its support for farming (see Comprehensive new SFI scheme a big step forward – the GWCT response), we are disappo...
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By Henrietta Appleton, GWCT Policy Officer (England)
Using the term ‘killing’ rather than ‘management’ would not be my choice when discussing the merits of removing one species to protect another. But I chose it here as it refers to the headings of two recent articles in the Guardian that demonst...
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