Swallow Numbers

Swallow collecting mud for its nest.

I live in South Lincolnshire and have kept a nature diary since the 22^nd November 1959 and in most years I have recorded the arrival and departure of Swallows here in South Lincolnshire.

Arrival dates have been gradually getting earlier about one week earlier over the past 50 years and I suppose that can be expected being as our climate is warming up.

Every year until the late 80′s I could see Swallows until around the middle of October but during the past twenty years they have been gradually leaving earlier until over the past few years they leave soon after the middle of September.

I estimate that Swallow numbers have declined by at least 80% in the past 40 years and I put that down mainly to the reduction in cattle numbers. There are now no cattle within two miles of where I live. I also know that there are less insects in and around our crops.

According to my nest records I know that Swallows in the 1970s and 1980s in South Lincolnshire fledged their first brood during the second half of June and their second brood in August. In the last few years Swallows in this area have fledged their first brood in July and their second brood in the first half of September.

Insect numbers have declined in South Lincolnshire. When I was a boy I can remember there being many flies, possibly up to 100 in our kitchen but today if there are three or four, that is all, and that is still too many for my wife. The front of my car used to be plastered with insects during the summer, now it doesn’t have half so many insects stuck on it.

With 20 million vehicles on our roads acting as fly swatters and every time our crops are sprayed we are either starving or killing insects, cattle and sheep are treated with insecticides to reduce parasites which reduces the amount of flies around them and in every walk of life 95% of people are at war with insects so we are bound to have less insects around.

Swallows tend to nest in the arches of houses and often they are removed by home owners as they can be seen as a mess (due to the bird droppings).  Unfortunatiy removing and disturbing their nests are helping the Swallow population to decline,  my suggestion to help prevent this decline is to purchase and install a bird box to re-home these animals.

Young Swallows in the workshop at Vine House Farm

Conclusions

Swallow numbers in South Lincolnshire will continue to decline especially if they are unable to rear a second brood.

GM Cropping Good or Bad?

There is no doubt about the fact that GM crops give farmers an increased yield per hectare but wildlife very quickly vanishes from the area. My experiences are from several visits to Argentina where GM cropping is now common place.

When I first visited farmers in the pampas in 1994 I was amazed at the amount of wildlife there was on farms, birds and insects were everywhere.

When I returned to the same farms in January 2008 there were very few birds, the cropping had altered, there were no new crops but there were more soya beans and less grass. All the wheat had been harvested and there were very few weeds in the soya beans and those that were there were dead or dying, they had had their third application of Roundup. The maize was also looking very healthy and weed free. What amazed me most was the lack of birds.

I returned to Argentina again in March 2009 this time to some of the best and most productive land in the pampas, best silt land with 1000 mm of rain per year, real double cropping land. One farm I visited also hosted Monsanto’s main trial grounds. While I was there I met one of Monsanto’s scientists. As we chatted about the trials and cropping he told me that GM farming was altering the environment, it was driving wildlife away. I had seen it with my own eyes and now one of  Monsanto’s scientists had confirmed it to me!

His statement wasn’t actually correct as birds return to the same area to breed each year, they don’t think there isn’t much food here and move on. They were bred there and that is their area. Their breeding productivity goes down because there are less insects and the population declines. There are less insects because there is no plant diversity, the crop is weed free. Each species of insect has it’s own specific host plant that it feeds on and it cannot live on any other species of plant. Any insects that may come and eat the maize will be sprayed as they will be reducing the yield of the crop or the crop has been specifically modified to kill the two most damaging species of insect on hatching.

Initially GM crops save chemicals and tractor operations but as the farmer gets into the system there will be plants from the previous crop growing which are resistant to roundup and if they are maize plants they will need two extra applications of herbicide  and that might not kill them all.

We are told that we need GM cropping to feed the world but as I toured Argentina and Chile I could see that there were plenty of places that could be brought into cultivation or just farmed better without the use of GM crops. However bringing those areas which are farmed extensively into intensive  farming will also reduce the wildlife.

There is no doubt that farmers can easily feed the world as it is now but whether we can in 30 years time as no one knows when we will run out of resources. The price of wheat only has to rise £20 or £30 / ton and farmers move up a gear throughout the world. That means more of the earths resources are used to make and apply chemicals to increase yields.

What we have to work out is how to produce more food without reducing wildlife as there is no doubt that the introduction of GM cropping into the UK will hasten the decline of wildlife in the British Countryside.

You can view the conservation work carried out on me farm on the Vine House Farm website by clicking here.

Is farming to blame for the decline of farmland birds?

I read an article in the National Farmers Union magazine about the declines in farmland birds. The author was saying that as we are using less chemicals on our farms than we were doing 20 years ago he didn’t see why farming should be to blame. These are my views on the subject:

We must realise that it is not the quantity of inputs we apply to our fields, it is when and how we apply them.  For instance if we apply a weed killer at the wrong time it does not work. Weed killers do not kill birds, they starve them and I fully realise that most of our farmland birds do not eat weeds.

We are all getting advice on when and how to apply our chemicals and the chemicals we are using are better at their job than they were 20 years ago,  our sprayers are far more efficient than they were 20 years ago, they also have to have an MOT and our operators have to be qualified, so we are now doing a far better job. We are applying less chemical and being more effective.

The weed killer of course kills the weeds and many insects are plant specific so if there is no Knotgrass there is no Knotgrass beetle, if there is no Groundsel and no Ragwort there is no Cinnabar moth and so on so and when there is a 100 acre field of wheat with no weeds in it and another one next to it with no weeds in it where are our farmland birds going to find the insects to feed their young on?

Birds cannot take their fledglings water, they have to take them moist food and that moist food is either insects or unripe seeds, both in the past supplied by weeds in our arable fields.

Every year our wheat fields are sprayed with three or more herbicides, two or more growth regulators, three or more fungicides, two insecticides and maybe a pre-harvest spray of roundup and many people are still wondering why our farmland birds are declining.

Silent spring

As I go around the farm feeding the birds I get so much pleasure when I hear them calling and singing, yes Great Tits and Mistle Thrushes have started to sing already.

We used to feed birds just at our farmyards but now I am feeding  at probably a dozen places around the farm. I also think about the book Silent Spring, but it won’t be a Silent Spring at Vine House Farm as I have lots of Reed Buntings, Linnets, Chaffinches, Yellowhammers, Great and Blue Tits, Goldfinches, Greenfinches and Tree Sparrows around. There are Bramblings with these birds, I have never seen so many Brambings on the farm as this winter, we must have about 150 of them.

One of the Bramblings when we had snow before Christmas

Nature notes

This morning I saw 10 Barn Owls flying  on my journey round my farms. Unusual to see so many so I am wondering why they have not been able to catch sufficient food in the long nights that we have at this time of year.

Everywhere I am feeding birds around the farn I have Bramblings, probably 150 birds in all. They are feeding with Chaffinches and Reed Buntings mainly.

I have one field of oil seed rape which the swans like, there are about 60 Mute Swans there each day and a few Bewick and Whooper Swans. Tday there were 6 Whoopers and 5 Bewicks. They go to roost each evening on the reservoir in Baston Fen where the Terns breed if anyone wants to see them close to at dusk.

A Bewick Swan feeding on the rape field with Mute Swans just after Christmas

About the farm

Barn Owl in flight at Vine House Farm

I always been interested in wildlife and in 1982 I was wanting to know what birds were breeding on my farm so I walked the farm with a map and recorded all the birds I saw and heard. I did this every year and by 1992 I realised that there had been a big drop in numbers, especially Skylarks and Corn Buntings.

I started to feed the birds on a large scale and it became a spectacle so I decided to have an open day. Visitors were so impressed that they were asking me to sell them bird food. The open day was repeated the following year and again the proceeds of the day were given to the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust. More people asked if they could buy bird food and so I was selling bird food without even trying. Two years later I realised that sunflowers were the ultimate food and so I grew a crop of sunflowers in 1998. The business has steadily increased and now I grow over 400 acres of bird seed 90% of which gets sold to the end use through the shop or by mail order. The remaining 10% goes to farm shops.

To increase the breeding birds on my farm I needed to have more diverse habitat and some how have weeds in my crops which I began experimenting with but by 1998 I realised that the way forward could well be to farm organically as this would be farming with weeds in my crops which is what the birds are missing in conventional farming. My first organic crop was in 2000 and I now have 250 acres converted  with more in conversion.

Since 1992 I have been improving the habitat of my farms by using the surveys that I do on my farms and other farmers farms by sowing wild flower meadows in the middle of fields to reduce field size, not filling in redundant dykes and having grass margins around my fields. I have converted 35 acres of arable land to wet grassland to encourage Lapwings. Placed boxes for Barn Owls around the district in old buildings and have now built three brick towers for Barn Owls. I have persuaded the local drainage board to only mow only one side and the watercourse of our main drains, totally about 15 miles, each year instead of both sides and the watercourse each year. This was treated with a lot scepticism at first but now we have wildlife corridors and I have saved the board thousands of £s in time and fuel.

I use the flail mower sparingly and in so doing save diesel but I now have more Whitethroats on my farms than all the other farmers in Deeping fen.

As well as grass margins I have annual arable weed margins. I have to cultivate these each year. The cultivation encourages annual weeds to grow such as chickweed, fat hen and bindweed, these are the weeds that used to grow in our crops. Insects live on these weeds which the birds need to feed their young on.

Each year I have several farm walks and tour the district giving talks about farming and wildlife raising over £1000 each year for the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust.

I now have three large wind turbines on my farm because I feel that we should be using less of our natural resources. In April this year I held a Renewable Energy Weekend so that people could come and see the various types of renewable energy that were available.