Donal Hickey: Habitat decline hits birds
Last week’s column on the impact of modern farming on wildlife brought reaction from a number of readers who also felt the Bride River Project, in east Cork that we mentioned might be a model for others, writes
A man we met in Freemount, Co Cork, asked if we had recently seen that beautiful small bird, the yellowhammer, once widespread in Ireland. The answer was no, sadly.
Aptly enough, Tom Lynch, a leading member of Clare Birdwatch, also instanced the plight of the same bird.
Loss of farmland habitat is generally agreed to be the main cause of its decline in the last half-century.
In a 2018 Birdwatch survey, Michael Bell used bird atlas maps to illustrate that decline.
According to maps, the yellowhammer was to be found almost everywhere, around 1970, but is now largely confined to the eastern side of the country and is red-listed for conservation.
In the Bride project, farmers are paid to maintain hedgerows, ditches and wildflowers and there would surely be support for extending this conservation template to other places.
The yellowhammer does well in tillage areas and Ennis-based Tom suggests farmers should be encouraged to grow a little grain and leave winter stubble.
Yellow hammer pic.twitter.com/dgBtITDqc2
— julesn (@julesn57) February 1, 2019
The fact that a small number of farmers are growing barley to feed sheep, in the Tubber area of the Burren, is helping to maintain the only flock of yellowhammers in Clare, Limerick or Kerry, though a smallish number at 60 pairs or so, he says.
“Hard to believe that yellowhammers were as common as robins a few short years ago,” says Toms.
In these matters it’s always worth keeping an eye on what’s happening in England where the Countryside Restoration Trust, a charity, is leading the way in promoting wildlife-friendly farming.
Over the past 25 years, it has been gradually assembling arable farmland and its headquarters is Lark Rise Farm, in Cambridgeshire, where it has in the trust’s own words “transformed a wildlife desert into a productive, 400-acre arable farm which now teems with wildlife”.
Lark Rise now has many skylarks, as well as other breeding birds that are rare elsewhere, such as barn owls and grey partridges.
Farmland flowers, including bee orchids, are evident once again; brown hares have returned and otters have recolonised the stream system.
All this has been achieved using smaller field sizes, crop rotation, leaving over-wintering stubble, beetle banks, wildlife strips and planting almost 9km of new hedgerows, with the aid of numerous volunteers.
In many parts of rural England, people take justifiable pride in their traditional hedge-laying skills.
