| THE ALLERTON PROJECT - INNOVATIVE FARMING - 25TH ANNIVERSARY Talking birds
Jim Egan took part in 68 radio interviews promoting the count and reached a total audience of 21 million listeners.
The 2017 GWCT Big Farmland Bird Count has provided some fascinating results. Jim Egan looks behind the scenes at the 2017 campaign and its achievements
he results for the 2017 GWCT Big Farmland Bird Count are out with a total of 112 species seen and more than 240,000 birds counted by 975 farmers, gamekeepers, landowners and conservationists. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes and planning for the 2017 count started in March last year, almost as soon as we had announced the 2016 results. We sat down as a team to review what had worked, what needed improving and new ideas we could implement.
T
One thing we’d been told by lots of people who took part in 2016 was, “it would be great to track what happens on my farm and to get some feedback”. The only way we thought we could do this was to build our own online recording system, but we were limited by budget and time constraints. However, we found a great partner, Agrantec, who understood what we wanted and were up for the challenge.
As we launched the 2017 count we were delighted to launch our new recording platform. It proved a huge success as nearly all the participants in this year’s count entered their data online and many of them took advantage of their personalised account to look at their own count records.
As well as keeping a record of count data the site also provides simple tips and hints for what can be done to help the birds recorded. We also took time to develop a series of species information sheets which are now available at
www.gwct.org.uk/farmlandbirds.
18 | GAMEWISE • SUMMER 2017 Improving bird identification
We received a lot of positive feedback from our Farmland Bird Identification Days, so we organised another 21 which took place across the whole of the UK in January and February. These couldn’t have happened without support from the GWCT Advisory Service and from our partners, The FWAG Association and the RSPB. We trained more than 300 people; 99% of them said they would recommend the training to others and 97% said the course had improved their knowledge of farmland birds. The event in Northern Ireland even made a TV appearance on the ‘Home Ground’ programme. Long-term GWCT supporter Count Maximillian Hardegg offered to help us run an identification day on his Seefeld Estate in Austria. This is not in the Austrian Alps as one might expect, but in the lowlands in the north of the country where there is fertile arable land. Run by Roger Draycott, our head of advisory, the day was a great success. Despite the cold (it was -7 degrees) more than 30 people attended including a TV crew, and we featured on the Austrian TV news and ended up with 28 returns from Austrian farms.
Jim Egan is our head of education and development at our Allerton Project demonstration farm. He has run the Big Farmland Bird Count from the start and is determined to highlight the work farmers do to help birds and other wildlife.
The Big Farmland Bird Count ID day on the Seefeld Estate featured on the Austrian TV news.
www.gwct.org.uk/allerton
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
