This month, ever decreasing numbers of Yellowhammers have started to return to breeding sites, but sadly these are all too few in Pembrokeshire these days. Roger Mathias, who farms in mid-Pembs, is determined to try and do something positive to try and reverse this steep decline. The National Trust (through projects set up by Mark Underhill and James Roden) is also undertaking favourable management on some of their tenanted farms where this species occurs, so there is some hope.
Below is a short article that Roger has written about an interesting winter feeding project. It does indicate that, in the right places, much can be done to help Yellowhammers (and other farmland birds) to get through the hard winter period where food shortages are an important issue in the modern farmland environment. Hopefully his/Puffin Produce/‘Root Zero’ support initiative will go some way to ensuring that Yellowhammer population starts to recover and prosper in Pembrokeshire once again.
Roger's article:
I remember the ‘jingly’ sound of yellowhammers around me as I walked home from Primary School on summer days, not quite believing that such a bright yellow bird could hide and disappear in seconds. Without my realising it, many years later they have almost disappeared from the hedges and fields. They simply ran out of year-round food. For many years, the seeds so important to them, left over from corn harvest just weren’t there. Different crops and more efficient machines meant less ‘left-overs’.
Replacing
their winter food can be done, and that’s one of the aims of our Root Zero
farmers. We are doing this in two ways. We sow special areas of seed rich
plants which are left unharvested to help feed them when frosts and short wet
stormy days make finding food so difficult. We also place ‘farm size’ bird
feeders around our fields, filled with wheat, oats and oil seed rape grains,
grown and mixed by one of our own farmers.
We
have small numbers of yellowhammers on our farms, and we are determined to help
them return to our Welsh countryside, so that the ‘little bit of bread and
no cheese’ song can join the stunning yellow feathers in brightening our
summer walks.
For more information about the feeders, go
to https://perdixwildlifesupplies.com/