In the tenth article of the Wilding for Conservation series, Tim Gardiner and Dorothy Casey demonstrate how orthopteran populations have responded to changes on wilded grassland on former arable land in an attempt to shed light on how effective rewilding former farmland is as a means of increasing biodiversity. “Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets) can be
A previous article in British Wildlife (Sayer et al. 2013) focused on Richard Waddingham and his Norfolk farm, emphasising an urgent need for pond restoration and management on farmland. Here, Carl Sayer, Juliet Hawkins and Helen Greaves discuss the history of farm ponds, the problems that they have faced over recent decades, the restoration and
Dorothy Casey, Rob Fuller, John Baker, Juliet Hawkins, and Julian Roughton use examples from East Anglia to discuss the impacts of natural regeneration and the restoration and creation of ponds on the wildlife of arable land, and describe the resultant process of species colonisations at wilded sites. Post-war agricultural intensification has led to widespread erosion of extent, complexity
Harvest Mice Micromys minutus have always been associated with lowland arable landscapes, typically portrayed sitting on an ear of wheat. Their name relates to their abundance at harvest time, when they were frequently seen in large numbers as the crops were being cut.
There is a passage in J E Lousley's classic New Naturalist title Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone (1950) where he describes, in his typically cryptic way, a place of 'chalky cultivated fields… above the Medway', where the 'rare little Hairy Mallow' and various other chalkland rarities grow.
Sixty years ago, the renowned naturalist Ronald Lockley wrote an account of a year spent farming on the Pembrokeshire coast. The book was called The Golden Year, echoing the title of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, written a century earlier after a visit to Wales.
There has probably never been more attention devoted to the effects of farming on the environment and wildlife than there is at the present time. Declines in farmland bird species (Fuller et al. 1995) have captured the public imagination, but declines in other groups, such as invertebrates and plants, have been no less severe (Donald 1998)
Boscregan Farm, situated near the southern end of the parish of St Just in Penwith,Cornwall, is a typical West Penwith hamlet. It is home to the beautiful and rare Purple Viper’s-bugloss Echium plantagineum and is the only site where this plant can now be said to be truly native on the British mainland (Cuddy 1991).
Set-aside exists primarily to reduce over-production of the food crops it replaces and to permit reductions in the costs of agricultural price support in the European Union (EU) (Floyd 1992). In Britain, set-aside became a prominent feature of our farmland in autumn 1992, when wide-ranging reforms of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) meant that
Farming occupies over 75% of the British countryside and is central to the rural economy, landscape and nature conservation. Since man first began to clear the ancient wildwood over 5,000 years ago, farming has shaped our countryside and the wildlife that depends on it. Today, about 30% of all farmland is arable land which is
Chamomile, Chamaemelum nobile, 'the herb of humility', is an unassuming flower with the appearance of a rather wilted daisy. This humble plant has been used in the treatment of a variety of ailments for the last 2,000 years. Ancient Egyptians revered it for its virtues and, in their belief in its power to cure ague, dedicated
It seems, nowadays, that having 'corn' in one's name is a very unlucky epithet for plants and birds alike. Botanists will know that both Corncockle, Agrostemma githago, and Cornflower, Centaurea cyanus, have both declined drastically in the last few decades. Ornithologists will have long been aware of the retreat north and west of the Corncrake, Crex crex.
In May 1992 significant new changes in the Common Agricultural Policy were announced which will result in the great majority of cereal farmers putting land into set-aside and which potentially opens the door to further measures designed to require environmentally sensitive farming. It now seems likely that set-aside is here to stay.
The history of settled, non-nomadic human civilisation is paralleled by the history of cereal cultivation, and to a large extent the two are mutually dependent. Weeds have accompanied these cultivated annual grasses since their wild days, and in a very real sense the history of weeds is the history of mankind.
