January

On 19th & 20th January the team at GWCT’s Allerton Project was delighted to welcome BBC Countryfile for two days of intensive filming, with the 320ha Loddington estate acting as the ‘hub’ for an episode that was broadcast on Sunday 6th February 2022. You can watch it on iPlayer here >

The GWCT’s Big Farmland Bird Count (BFBC) is pleased to announce a FREE collaborative online webinar on the 9th of February at 7pm to help record what farm birds are present at this time of year during the official count from February 4th - 20th. You can register for the FREE webinar here.

"I’d like to think that most game managers are conservationists at heart, and I’m certainly only doing my advisory service job after 40 years with the GWCT because I believe in the conservation spin off from the help that I give"

We are once again joining forces with the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) to showcase the important role farmers play when it comes to looking after farmland birds.

Farmer clusters in the Avon Valley and encircling Martin Down have put farmers at the heart of conservation and the results are there for all to see.

With Defra due to undertake a call for evidence on the future of fox snares, there has never been a better moment to make the distinction between a modern humane cable restraint that meets international standards, and the cheap and nasty wires that went before. 

At our demonstration farm, the Allerton project, we have undertaken research to understand what constitutes a healthy soil and how to measure constituents such as soil moisture as well as research considering the role of soil in crop production “in the round” i.e. from both a sustainable and profitable perspective.

The use of the term “peatland burning” (or peatland fires or burning peat) is factually incorrect and misleading when used in conjunction with criticisms of grouse moor management.

During the 2021 breeding season, the Owl Box Initiative’s monitoring team began box checks in May and continued, at occupied boxes, until the last chicks were ringed in October. The longer breeding season was, in part, due to a number of barn owl pairs across our study areas producing a second brood.

In the wake of COP26, climate change is something many of us are thinking about – and rightly so. Following COP21 in 2015, 195 nations committed to try to keep the global average temperature no more than 2°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, aiming for less than 1.5°C of warming. You might then be asking, why 1.5°C?