2024

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.

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.