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What do you get if you mix an enthusiastic and dedicated bunch of farmers, volunteers and RSPB staff and stick them in front of an international audience from across the agriculture sector for a day? Lots of interesting discussions, real insight to the value of our farmland conservation work and plenty...

Fancy filling your belly for free? If like me you are a frugal type and not easily embarrassed, this is the time of year to scour Fen roadsides. Lorries piled to the brim with spuds, onions and carrots are trundling back and forth as fast as they can go from the field to the packing plant. You can...

Harvest is never a particularly busy time for farm wildlife advice! With my phone growing cobwebs, what better time to down Stewardship applications and escape on holiday to Iceland? A fabulous choice for nature enthusiasts as it turns out. As well as breathtaking close-up views of Humpback Whales...

Its an easy thing to be patriotic, I’m an Englishman, hatched and reared among the chalk horses of the Wiltshire countryside, and that for me is, as they say, where the heart is. Now living in North Wales, the same fondness the locals have for their homeland is evident, and understandably so...

I LOVE this time of year! Is it the long days? The celebrations? The countryside bustling with life? All these things! But most of all it's because it’s the time of year I get to make farmers pose self-consciously for photos in patches of pretty flowers! Awk-ward! Meet my latest victim...

I just had to share this - this year more farmers than ever have entered the RSPB Telegraph Nature of Farming Award . This is fabulous news. It was already the biggest farm wildlife award in the UK. But the bigger it gets, the better it will be in spreading the word about the essential role farmers play...

Weather. We all love to talk about it, none more so than farmers. Here in the Cambridgeshire Fens we are in the paradoxical position of having just had the second wettest April since records began but being one of the counties still worst hit by drought. As you can imagine that’s giving us plenty...

By Andrew Taylor, Great Bustard LIFE+ Project Adviser Thanks to a reintroduction project on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, the great bustard can now be seen on farms in south west England for the first time since the early 19 th Century. Perhaps the UK’s rarest farmland bird, this spectacular...

Mention the word 'farmer' in a sentence and most people would understand that you that you were talking about someone who produces food of some description. That's a farmer's job, right? Hmmm. What if that same person was described as a 'multifunctional rural resource manager'...

Spotted on my way home from work – a 100-strong mixed flock of buntings and yellowhammers , with the odd tree sparrow thrown in for good measure. Tweeting, jangling hissing and popping away, they are restless, exuberant and full of spring energy, torn between winter flocking behaviour and breaking...

Come on an RSPB training course! Whether you're an arable farmer who wants to get the best from your agri-environment scheme , or an advisor looking to help clients to integrate conservation into their land management, we can offer you expert training at various locations around the country. Courses...

Don’t you find that the world always seems better when you’re out in the fresh air, enjoying the steady arrival of spring? We outdoor types on the Eastern England farmland advisory team certainly think so. Looking at various winged things with RSPB and Buglife farmland bods ...

Is it nearly Spring yet? Well, it depends who you ask. While we patiently hang on for the 21 March, optimistic Celts have already celebrated Imbolc on 1 February. Its arrival was also heralded on 1 February by chicken farmers the world over, as they celebrated the day of their patron saint, St Brigid...

I lose track of the number of acronyms I come across every day, but there are some that are more memorable than others in this business. LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) is one of them. As an organisation, LEAF work to promote the integration of environmental protection into farming and understandably...

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...

I know, it’s Friday 13 January, you’re skint, you’re cold and the Summer Hols seems a long dark way away. I’m sure you don’t need to be depressed any further. However, with the Twelve Days of Christmas just recently come to an end (and most of us still struggling to shift...

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...

In my office, I'm often mocked for my eternal optimism. Even when asked the question "What can we do about farmland bird declines?" my answer would be 'Lots!" I'm positive that the future could be much brighter for many of the specialist birds that depend on farmland for survival...

Thursday 18 th November was a black day for wildlife-friendly farmers, as FWAG went into administration after being the largest supplier of environmental advice to the agriculture sector for the last 42 years. They supported the greatest number of agri-environment scheme applications of any organisation...

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’...

Back in the Wilkinson years, before Batty turned England Captain, before Kamara turned Sky pundit, and before Eric turned Red, I was a Leeds fan. Me and Dad had season tickets in the East Stand and never missed a home game. Eventually the endless 0-0 draws under George Graham put me off football altogether...

It’s been a busy few weeks for us here in Wales. The Royal Welsh Show kicked things off back in mid July, the biggest and best attended event of its kind in the UK, with four days of good weather and a huge number of visitors to the stand, so many in fact, we ran out of our increasingly popular...

Welcome to my office. I reckon it’s one of the biggest in the UK. Vaguely speaking, the ‘walls’ are the A14 to the south, the Cambridgeshire border to the west, the start of the sandy Brecks to the east, and to the North... Well I haven’t quite decided but it’s somewhere...

"A new type of Environmental Stewardship Scheme is needed, particularly to help buffer sites and establish stepping stones and ecological corridors" [ Lawton Report , Recommendation 16, p 82]. "Delivering a more effective ecological network may require refinements to the [Entry...

Blogger: Niki Williamson, Fenland Farmland Bird Adviser How do you enjoy your new potatoes? I like to keep it simple – get them as fresh as possible, boil them till they’re just cooked, and eat them piping hot, with British butter and mint from the garden – a perfect combination...