CASE STUDY - MANYDOWN |
Manydown: The farmland partridge story Trustee, Hugh Oliver-Bellasis, charts the journey of modern pesticide use and the creation of conservation headlands to help grey partridges My story of Manydown starts in the 1950s, on our family’s farm in Hampshire. I grew up learning to shoot and spent much of my time with gamekeepers. This time was formative, and footprints were left and, in my case, the footprint was the grey partridge. The farm consisted of three keepered beats and lay on the very edge of the South Downs – reasonable partridge country and they were a common sight on the farm. I left in 1962, but returning to Manydown in 1978, I was immediately aware that things had changed. Farming was different. There was a greater emphasis on crop production, which was being well rewarded, with increased mechanisation and yields, resulting in far fewer partridges than before. Some things had not changed. The keepers still controlled predators and hedges were still well managed. There may have been more pheasants, but not many, but efficient crop production was very different. The sheep flock had gone, together with stubble turnips in autumn. The switch to winter cereals was stark with spring crops reduced by 70%, replaced by higher yielding winter-sown barley and wheat, thus critically losing stubble fields over winter.
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Dick Potts and the GCT In 1979, I had a meeting with Charles Coles, the director at The Game Conservancy Trust, and Dr Dick Potts, the director of research. Dick had been conducting monitoring work in Sussex since 1968, designed to measure the impact of changes in farming on the fauna and flora of arable land. Because of the detailed data collection over an uninterrupted time-span, the Sussex Study allowed sophisticated analyses of the environmental impact and conservation implications of pesticide use. After more than a decade, clear evidence was emerging that the insects that young partridge chicks needed were no longer present, and this was likely to be a cause of partridge declines. It became clear that this needed to be rigorously tested. If Dick’s hypothesis was correct and insects were important to grey partridge chicks, what could be done to support them without a major impact on crop production? The double hit of modern pesticide use was that insecticides directly removed the chick-food insects, while herbicides removed their host plants. But no one understood this complicated indirect effect. Farmers were
rapidly changing their cropping patterns and did not understand that this was seriously harming wildlife. Fortunately, Dick and his Sussex work was way ahead of its time (see page 48). Another study by Professor Nick Sotherton on the knotgrass beetle, a key component in the diet of young partridge chicks, also showed that this species was declining. The beetle only feeds, lays its eggs and rears its young on two species of broad-leaved weed: knotgrass and black bindweed. Both weed species were targets of the new herbicide chemistry. Knotgrass is a very difficult agricultural weed, so was a crop competitor weed that needed to be removed. This was the dilemma: a bird needing insects for its chicks in the summer, and farmers removing the plants on which these insects rely. Dick was convinced that the problem lay in the change in cropping from spring to winter and the management needs of winter-sown crops to control weeds and pests. This needed to be tested at farm level. So, the hunt was on to find a farm with grey partridges, with keepering and good nesting habitat, and a farmer that would let him manipulate crops.
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