‘This is a robust recipe’: the experimental farm bucking the decline in UK birds — SkimNews
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- Allerton Project recorded a 145% rise in farm bird abundance since monitoring began in 1992, compared with a 23% decline nationally over the same period.
- Alastair Leake reports that birds fed on the direct-drilled half of an experimental wheat field rather than the ploughed half, where seeds, earthworms and insects had been buried.
- Allerton Project maintains “bird tables” of unkempt strips planted with kale, teasel, sorghum and millet to supply winter seed; Leake calls this its most important measure and says birds surviving the January–March hungry gap are ready to breed again.
- Allerton Project uses a “beetle bank” of uncultivated, tussock-forming perennial grasses where beetles overwinter, then emerge in spring to eat crop pests, reducing pesticide spraying and supplying insect food for birds.
- Alastair Leake says Allerton targets foxes and crows only during nesting season to reduce predation on eggs and chicks, limiting pressure when ground-nesting birds are most vulnerable.
- Allerton Project has run the 320-hectare working farm and research centre on the Leicestershire-Rutland border for more than three decades, testing farming methods with farmers and scientists and hosting policymakers and businesses.
- RSPB attributes the wider UK decline to increased pesticide use and loss of suitable habitat, which it says drove some farmland bird species to extinction.
Why it matters: For UK farmers, Allerton’s 145% rise against a 23% national decline makes wildlife recovery a tested set of on-farm choices rather than an abstract conservation goal. Its seed strips, beetle banks and tightly timed predator control connect more birds with lower pesticide use and better prospects for breeding after the January–March hungry gap.
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