Gamekeeper

The harvest is all but over, game broods are growing and the season looks promising — despite, not because of, modern farming methods

As the harvest draws to a close on the estate, the changing season gives time to reflect on the summer past and quantify the potential for the coming season.

The summer of 2018 was remarkable. Winter had a sting in the tail in the shape of the Beast from the East, which made the summer warmth all the more special.

Both pheasant and partridge broods are showing up nicely. It is a common saying at the moment that “I’ve never seen a brood there before”. I recently found a hen partridge, a casualty of a speeding vehicle. My initial thought was how vulnerable the young brood would be now that only one adult was able to keep watch over the family. I looked in vain to see where the family was, as only a day or so before eight young and two adults were feeding nearby on a conservation headland.

Stricken brood

It wasn’t until four days later I spotted the family being chaperoned by a single old bird and to my surprise, only metres away, another much larger family with two very alert parents interacting with the stricken brood. Where this family had come from I have no idea, but the chances are they would play a key role in helping to protect the other motherless family.

Harvest was completed on most farms in late August, remarkable for the north. The speed of the harvest operation continually surprises me. A winter-sown arable mix of wheat, barley and oil seed rape is the dominant cropping system. The game birds in the crops go through a hugely disruptive period in their lives at this time that I’m sure takes its toll. Agriculture has undergone massive changes over the past 60 years and the pace of improvements seems to accelerate from year to year.

It is a far cry from the mixed farming system I was first introduced to in my early working years. It had cattle, sheep or both, barley and a field of roots mainly swede turnips. I rarely saw wheat but occasionally a field of oats augmented the barley. The intention was to deliver self-reliance; crops were grown to feed stock in the winter and the root crop was chopped and fed to cattle and sheep. Combine harvesters were small, designed to get into tiny fields and gateways. All crops were sown in the spring and harvest did not start until September. An early winter meant combines were stuck in fields and crops all but ruined.

The arable farming system we see today is very different. As soon as the combine leaves the field, another enormous machine pulling a plough or a cultivator starts the whole process again. The aim is to get crops established before the winter begins, reduce competition and establish a crop that will sit out the bitter months with a strong root system ready to sprout in the first warm days of spring.

The pace of this modern operation and the efficiency of the harvest is staggering. I fully understand the economic drivers that demand ever more efficient cropping. The need to feed the human population and the necessity of the farmer to survive in a hugely competitive world is not lost on me.

The devotion we make to wild game on the estate flirts with disaster when it stands alongside the modern agricultural system. If we did not make every effort to accommodate the needs of wild game there simply would be none.

The mixed farming system I referred to is a dinosaur. The inefficiency of the old combines coupled with a timely gap before another crop was established meant that food supplies for all manner of birds and wildlife were abundant long into winter. Agrochemicals were not widely used; insects and weed plants gave a varied diet in spring and summer.

Modern agriculture requires the wild bird keeper to consider the important factors of the past and build a management plan that provides, on as wide a scale possible, food in winter and throughout the rest of the lean months; habitats that provide an insect-rich environment to help game and other birds rear young; and cover to hide vulnerable birds from predators.

Today, if you fail to understand the farming system, you jeopardise all attempts to produce wild birds.

“The devotion to wild game flirts with disaster alongside modern agriculture”

Changes in agriculture have affected wild game — without keepers there simply would be none