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This week we’re returning to a showpiece event for beef farmers. We have attended this event a few times in the past to get across the important role that cattle farming plays in shaping our countryside and the opportunities available to wildlife. See here and here . At this year’s event...

While researching my article for Birds magazine, I had lots of suggestions for farms to use as case studies from RSPB staff all over the UK. One suggestion that particularly inspired me was the work that Amanda, Chris and Denise are doing on Peelhams Farm. So much so that I’ve just placed my first...

With a bit of a wash and brush up, a heifer born and bred on an RSPB Islay reserve wooed the judges at the recent Royal Highland Winter Fair , being awarded champion of her class. Named Banrigh Innse Ghall (Gaelic for ‘Queen of the Hebrides’), the 400Kg charolais cross was born into the 200...

Some wrongly label extensive livestock farming systems as ‘inefficient’. A case study of the livestock farming system on one of our upland reserves highlights that these systems can provide a lot more than first meets the eye. Following a successful day at last year's ‘National...

The current Cornish chough population (six breeding pairs in 2011) is the only one in England, having returned naturally to the Duchy in 2001. There is also a small edge of range population of corn buntings on the north coast of Cornwall and you can now see choughs and corn buntings feeding together...

We are now well into the second year of the Great Crane Project – and have spent the spring and summer hatching and rearing another batch of cranes to joint the eighteen birds that were released last year. This brings the number out on the Somerset Levels and Moors to 34. After three weeks of ‘anchoring’...

I love it when things work out well. We put a stack of effort into working with farmers to find new ways to help wildlife. Not every idea will turn out to be as practical or effective as we want it to be (that is the point of testing ideas out after all), but I’m pleased to say that we have a new...

As an event on all things beef production, we thought this would be a good place to be talking about some of the relationships between cattle and wildlife. There are many birds that have evolved age-old relationships with grazing livestock, and particularly benefit from cattle grazing: birds such as...