Bog Myrtle & Peat

After three months of feeding wild birds with my pheasant hoppers, I finally have concrete evidence to suggest that pheasants and chaffinches are not the only ones to be benefitting. On the offchance, I set a Fenn trap in a wooden tunnel beside one of my hoppers last month. This morning, I had a visitor. It makes perfect sense that my wheat hoppers should have been attracting rats, and while these little rodents are a problem, I’m taking their arrival as something of a good sign.

Until I began my winter feeding project, the Chayne really was a barren and desolate place. When the cold weather came on, the entire population of wild birds and animals either died or moved downhill. It meant that for four months of the year, nothing moved except the occasional red grouse up in the heather. Since starting to feed over the winter, the effect has been dramatic. The woods where the hoppers are sited are now literally filled with songbirds. Chaffinches, tits and blackbirds all pass through the trees in chatty flocks, while woodpigeons and pheasants gather beneath the containers and fill their crops.

At the same time, the hoppers have brought trouble. Mapgpies (the first of which I have ever seen on the farm arrived this winter), jackdaws, crows and now rats all seem to be profiting from the dumps of food across the farm, and while it seems mad to attract these nasty vermin species onto the place, there is some encouragement to be had. If you look at it logically, I had never seen a magpie or a rat on the farm until this year because there just wasn’t the food to support them. Put simply, the Chayne was so barren that not even a rat would live there over the winter. If opportunists like rats and magpies weren’t prospering, then it was quite an ask to expect specialist game birds to thrive.

It seems like improvements to a habitat, be they artificial feeding or heather management, will always have a far reaching knock on effect on a number of bird and animal species. I had meant to encourage pheasants and songbirds and I found that I had brought on magpies and rats as well. I suppose it now becomes a matter of killing the vermin species and allowing the target species to get the benefit of the work. I find encouragement in the fact that, until now, I’ve had precious little vermin to kill, and I use the arrival of vermin as a sign that animals and birds are beginning to resurge. They may not be the right species, but they’re a step in the right direction.

I bought a tonne of wheat in October and now find that I’m going to be left with a few bags spare when April comes. I had originally expected many more birds to feed on the wheat, but it’s hardly surprising that this year has been a bit of a blank. I will keep on feeding year after year in the hope that, as a supply of wheat becomes a constant, songbirds and gamebirds will start to build up in numbers.