By Niki Williamson, Fenland Farmland Bird Adviser
We like overwintered stubble in the Fens. It helps prevent the notorious ‘fen blow’, a terrifying local weather phenomenon, where dark clouds of loose peat blast across the countryside like black sandstorms, making it look like the end of the world is coming.
It’s also great for wildlife. It provides cover for mammals and insects over winter, and birds like skylarks and linnets can find food in the form of spilt grain and seeds from the other plants growing there.
But despite this, I’m always thrilled to watch some of it being ploughed up late autumn when it’s for one of our characterful local ploughing contests.
Have you ever been to one? They tend to be little publicised and attended by the enthusiast few, but if you seek one out you’ll be rewarded with a quirky, quintessentially British celebration of industry and skill.
The contest at Cottenham this year attracted a very diverse bunch of characters, and among the people I chatted to were men who had been farming for the best part of 50 years. Needless to say they had plenty of tales to tell of how the industry had changed, but the ones that shocked and saddened me were the wistful memories of how the countryside used to be.
One after another they told me tales of the enormous bunting flocks that were a regular occurrence, the days when you’d get back from a day in fields covered head to toe in insects, and the days when tree sparrows were so numerous they were considered a pest.
A colleague has already blogged in these pages about the dangers of resetting our baseline of what’s accepted as normal, and as the number of bugs and beasts in the countryside continues to fall it seems these dim and distant memories could soon be lost forever.
Of course it’s just not a possibility to return to the kind of farming that our farm wildlife evolved to coexist with. Nobody’s asking for that. There are seven billion of us to feed now.
But it has been shown again and again that doing the right stuff in agri-environment schemes – stuff like overwintered stubbles – can really turn things around for wildlife. Many farmers I met consider looking after it as much a part of their job as producing food.
What about you? Do you or someone you know have a countryside memory to share? Why not tell us about it here?