On Saturday morning I was listening to Saturday Live on Radio 4 and a piece about punting in Cambridge. Now I’ve done my share of punting, in the rather distant past, but the sound of the skylark was not a common accompaniment to those trips though it did feature in the radio programme’s soundtrack.
It reminded me of early mornings carrying out a Common Bird Census survey on the farmland behind the Grange Road rugby ground back in the late 1970s. Skylarks were legion back then, and this summer I had hoped to make some repeat visits and see how numbers had changed. John Marchant in the BTO , who had surveyed the site himself in the past too, had been extremely helpful in sending me some maps of the site’s boundary and I was all set. Except I have failed this year because, largely, of the weather. There were so many rainy mornings that I never got to walk around counting skylarks and other farmland birds. I’m grateful to John and the BTO for sending me the maps and I hope to do better next year.
I mention those skylarks at the beginning of Chapter 7 of Fighting for Birds which is all about farming and farmland birds, and the chapter ends with a discussion of Hope Farm, not that far from Cambridge either, so it seemed rather appropriate that a report about the Hope Farm work arrived in the post on Saturday morning too.
The report is a good one both in the sense that it is well-written and well-illustrated (I love Katie Fuller’s artwork on the cover) but also in that it does tell a tale of hope. I will keep coming back to Hope Farm and the farming scene this week but I’ll end this blog by pointing out that even though you won’t hear skylarks from your punt over the Backs in Cambridge you will hear them a few miles away at Hope Farm – and in increased numbers.
The RSPB acquired Hope Farm in 1999 and in the first year of bird surveys, 2000, there were 10 pairs of skylarks on that very typical 181ha of Cambridgeshire arable land. In the last three years covered in the report (2009-11) the skylark numbers were in the low 40s – a quadrupling of numbers.
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I am reviewing the new ‘ Barn owl Conservation handbook’ at the moment for Bird Watching magazine. The RSPB need to get a copy for the manager at Hope Farm as the chapter that covers Rat Poison shows 89% of Barn Owls in Cambridgeshire carry some form of poison in their liver. The RSPB use these same poisons on Hope Farm but done professionally by contractors! I do not see any of this professionalism preventing poison entering the food chain in this book!