Auchnerran Blog

With the colourful days of autumn behind us, we wrapped up our annual partridge surveys, worm counts and VESS assessments, and set our sights northward. November brought us to the Scottish Demonstration Farm at Auchnerran, where we helped to tackle a long-term challenge on the farm: rabbits.

Here at Auchnerran, we’ve been actively participating in a colour ringing scheme for lapwings since 2018. Over the past few years, we’ve ringed both adult lapwings and their larger chicks, marking them with a distinctive yellow flag above their right knee. So, if you happen to spot a lapwing sporting this mark, there’s a good chance it’s one of ours!

Presenter Dougie Vipond made a visit to the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s demonstration farm in Aberdeenshire to see how their landscape-scale approach to farming and conservation is helping wader species such as lapwing, oystercatcher and curlew thrive.

Everyone has their own idea of when spring has arrived; for some it’s the first time they spot daffodils coming up, for others it might be the first gloopy frogspawn in a puddle. Here at Auchnerran, it’s a weird, looping sound that fills the skies, almost reminiscent of somebody trying to tune an old radio receiver.

Songbird feeders come in many shapes and sizes and are a common sight in gardens, filled with hundreds of different seed and grain mixes to suit a variety of birds and beak sizes. Yet despite the options available, the reality is overwinter feeding options for songbirds in farmland settings remain somewhat limited. So that is something we are aiming to change with our new songbird feeder research in Scotland.

On a drizzly Saturday in November, four students packed up their fieldwork gear and drove up the winding and picturesque road to Auchnerran, the GWCT Scottish Demonstration Farm.

Well, that’s everything done at our Scottish demonstration farm for another year! Another busy breeding season for the waders is winding down and coming to a close. While we had large numbers of returning birds (with a maximum pre-breeding count of 164 lapwing, larger than both the 2021 & ’22 seasons), we did have fewer nests than in previous years. 

A walk around GWSDF Auchnerran would not be complete without resident buzzards and red kites. We are lucky enough to be visited by an incredibly diverse range of raptor species, such as hen harriers, sparrowhawks and goshawks. Recently, we have witnessed a drastic increase in the number of raptors of various species observed utilising the farm, based on data from our raptor monitoring transects (conducted monthly since 2018).

We are delighted to be able to send our culled rabbits to be used as feed for juvenile golden eagles at the South of Scotland Golden Eagle Project (SSGEP). Remarkably, this project has been able to more than double the population of golden eagles in the south of Scotland since 2018.

Hello and welcome to another Annual Report of our activities at Auchnerran. What a challenging year it has been!