I hope you like numbers (don’t you?) as I have a few for you today:
100, a lovely round number isn’t it, it’s more than an impulse. It’s a ton, a significant milestone.
It’s the number of bird surveys RSPB Volunteers carried out for Eastern England farmers this April. That’s about 500 hours donated to help farmers find out more about their birdlife in just one month: quite a gift I hope you agree! Another 20 surveys will hopefully have been started in May, and each surveyor needs to fit in three surveys on their local farm before Harvest gets going in Mid July to complete the V&FA survey.
This gives us enough information to deduce where the key species are holding territories so we can show these on the final map presented to the farmer, inform future habitat management and support a HLS application where relevant.
9’111.01 (911: american emergency plus room 101- read into it what you will!)
This huge number is the number of hectares Eastern England Volunteers have surveyed so far this year- if those farmers all did the farmland bird package just on that fraction of their land, that could equate to 180 football pitches worth of wild bird seed mixtures to get farmland birds through the hungry gap in winter.
12- a dozen and the number of years we’ve been providing this service to farmers. Over the years, we’ve worked with over a thousand farmers here in the east, and hope to work with many more, either by providing a free bird surveys, helping to make agri-environment schemes work for both the farm and its wildlife, and offer practical advice, training & solutions.
I’m one of 138 Volunteers doing farmland bird surveys in their own time this year, and it brings so many rewards, not just some brilliant bird ticks (but a love of birds does help as you’ll see...).
This year, a few of our volunteer surveyors (including me) will be sending in their survey diaries which I will post here when available- so watch this space!