Farming

Farming: wildlife and plants

Wild birds

Redirecting farm support payments away from production and into supporting environmental stewardship activities makes farmland conservation an important area of development for UK farms.

Conserving, improving and enhancing the farmland to benefit wild birds is a key feature in this.

Wild birds such as yellowhammers, skylarks, grey partridges and tree sparrows will thrive on your farm if they can find three things:

  • nesting habitat - the right conditions for rearing and protecting their young
  • insect food - for adults to feed to chicks in the spring
  • seed food - to sustain adult birds throughout the year

Detailed below are a number of schemes to help support this.

This page also includes links to the legislative protection for wild birds, their nests and eggs and the licensing requirements for controlling wild birds where appropriate.

Environmental Stewardship Scheme

The Environmental Stewardship Scheme provides access to funding for farmers to provide nesting sites, habitats and improved biodiversity on farms to encourage wild bird populations.

The Entry Level Scheme (ELS), the Organic Entry Level Scheme (OELS) and the Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) scheme all have wild-bird focused obligations to protect habitats and help increase the wild bird population.

The farmland bird indicator is calculated on the breeding populations of 20 species. Collectively, these populations have declined by 40% since the mid-1970s. Defra, under its Public Service Agreement target, is committed to improving and enhancing the biodiversity of our farmland to reverse the long-term decline by 2020.

Management advice

Natural England provides a number of management handbooks. The publications are written or farmers and land managers and cover a range of habitats. Publications can be accessed from an online catalogue. These include:

  • Lowland grassland management handbook
  • Upland management handbook
  • The scrub management handbook

The handbooks include practical guidance to benefit bird populations.

Further guidance on managing habitats is available from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), including information on beetle banks, field margins, conservation margins, set-a-side and over-wintered stubbles.

The RSPB also has a section of its website dedicated to providing advice to farmers, including interactive software to help you make the most of the Environmental Stewardship Scheme.

Conservation of bird species

The RSPB  split birds into groups of conservation importance - red, amber and green lists. Red is the highest conservation priority, with species needing urgent action:

  • red list species are globally threatened
  • amber species have undergone historical population decline, but are recovering with populations doubling over the last 25 years
  • green list species have no identified threat to the population's status

The RSPB runs a scheme called the Volunteer and Farmer Alliance to help reverse the decline of farmland bird populations by working together with conservation volunteers and farmers.

The scheme provides a confidential survey of the birds on your land, undertaken by RSPB volunteers - with the results presented on a map showing where on the farm the birds of conservation concern can be found. 

Wildlife management and protection

The EU Wild Birds Directive introduced protection for all of Europe's wild birds, identifying 194 species and sub-species among them as particularly threatened and in need of special conservation measures. This is implemented in England through the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 (as amended).

There are occurrences where controlling wild bird populations may be required. Where appropriate, Natural England issues licences on behalf of Defra to permit otherwise prohibited action to be taken to resolve problems where there is no other satisfactory solution. For example controlling wild birds may be required to:

  • prevent serious damage to livestock, foodstuffs for livestock, crops, vegetables, fruit, growing timber or any other form of property or to fisheries.
  • preserve public health or public safety
  • prevent the spread of disease
See the Natural England wildlife management and licensing website for further details.

Farmland bird advice

Further advice on farmland birds can be obtained from Natural England, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG). 

Links

Defra
External

Further information

FWAG: 02476 696 699

Page last modified: 28 December 2007
Page published: 1 July 2006

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs