I’ve spent quite a bit of time in a cold muddy field in Bedfordshire this week.
Why? Well I did ask myself that a couple of times as I rubbed my frozen hands. But then a large flock of corn buntings would take off from amongst the stubble and dart nervously towards the cover of trees and I’d remember.
Corn buntings are one of the UK’s most threatened farmland birds, their populations have declined by 90 per cent since the 1970s. So discover 700 of them – around 4 per cent of the total UK population - in one field in the village of Stotfold was remarkable.
It caught the attention of birdwatchers and also the media, and gave us a chance to talk about our work with farmers on Radio 4’s Farming Today – you can hear the programme again on the BBC Iplayer.
And although it was the corn buntings we were there to see, we were also surrounded by skylarks, yellowhammers, redwings, starlings and rooks. There surely cannot be many farmers’ fields in England with more birds in than this one, and it was all down to simple environmental measures the local farmer had taken the time and effort to put in place.
Which makes our message on farming all the more relevant. Farming’s raison d’etre is to put food on our table, but farmers are also at the forefront of countryside conservation - and that’s something they should rightly be proud of.