Grey partridges at Balgonie
Patches are cut into the chicory to create a shorter, more open structure better suited to chicks. © Dave Parish/GWCT
BACKGROUND
Balgonie is a site in Fife, Scotland where we are working with Balgonie Estates Ltd, Kingdom Farming, Scottish Agronomy and Kings Seeds to increase grey partridge numbers but also develop a long-term ‘conservation crop’ prescription for farmland wildlife. We hope this will be a more attrac- tive option for farmers who dislike annual crops, which are currently all that are supported in the Scottish agri-environment scheme, and that we can convince the Scottish Government of its merits.
Since 2014 (our baseline year) we have been monitoring grey partridge numbers and a suite of other wildlife to document any wide-scale effects on biodiversity of the management changes that started in 2015, when Kingdom Farming sowed seven kilometres (km) of four-metre-wide chicory strips at the edges of several fields, alongside existing hedges. Despite a poor year generally for grey partridge productivity (see the Partridge Count Scheme article on page 30) the birds at Balgonie performed well, with produc- tivity and the total autumn density continuing to increase compared with the starting conditions in 2014, up 11% and 19% respectively on 2015 figures (see Table 1). All but one of the 21 coveys that included chicks comprised very young birds, suggesting they were from late, perhaps replacement, clutches. This would tie in with the harsh weather in the early summer. The chicory headlands are now mature, standing around two metres tall. To try
and improve their multi-functionality, we have cut small patches into the edges of the headlands to create less dense areas where grey partridge chicks might prefer to forage (see above picture). We had hoped to assess how important the new conser- vation-crop headlands were to grey partridges by radio-tagging a number of females, but despite catching and tagging 12 hens in February and March, we obtained very little information from them as the birds shed their tags quickly and, apparently, easily. This was because we used a novel method of gluing tags to the backs of the birds, rather than attaching them via a harness, and the birds were able to remove them (see picture right). With the help of Arran Greenhop, a MRes student from Leeds University, we
investigated the use of the headlands by other birds in more detail. We compared the number of birds seen in the new conservation headlands and in conventional crop headlands during spring and summer 2016. We found that there were no differ- ences at all due to the headlands, but that hedge structure was more important, with larger, less gappy hedges supporting more birds (similar to recent findings at our other Scottish grey partridge site at Whitburgh). Within the conservation-crop headlands, we found that bird abundance increased slightly with decreasing crop density – something
38 | GAME & WILDLIFE REVIEW 2016
www.gwct.org.uk
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