Just when I was beginning to think that my conversation with an Essex Wildlife Trust representative at the Tendring Show had been a fruitless exercise, the Trust made contact. Somebody rang yesterday, whose job is to liaise with small landowners who have expressed an interest in managing their plot so as to be more attractive to wildlife, and today they called round. I was expecting two of them, and was surprised when a third person emerged from the back of their EWT van. I wouldn't have thought it took three people to talk to one country gardener about owl boxes, but one was very young, and the second had been wearing a British Conservation Volunteers shirt and not an Essex Wildlife Trust one the last time I saw her, so I think there may have been some on-the-job training going on.
They were greatly taken with the meadow. I hadn't been up there for several days, and was pleasantly surprised myself at how good it was looking. Field scabious, Knautia arvensis, which is a native wildflower much loved by bees, with pretty, pale mauve, scabious-like (as you'd expect) flowers has seeded itself into the areas of long grass in good quantities. The plants are perennial, and numbers have been gradually building up, but I've never seen so many as this year. There were quite a few butterflies fluttering about, in what has been a dreadful year for butterflies, and the whole place had a tranquil, other-worldly aspect.
On the downside, as I suspected, the trees along that side of the wood are not great for putting owl boxes on. Barn owls need to be able to see the box as they fly past, and they won't go flapping and scrambling through a maze of branches to reach it, so the ideal tree is one with a solid but exposed trunk that you can fasten the box to. The canopies of our trees are too wide, dense and low. I'd thought maybe we could have a box on a pole, which barn owls will use, but I gather from the literature they don't like them as much as boxes on trees. We had a quick look in the wood, at the wildlife officer's request, to see if the opposite face of the wood provided better sites, and I think because they wanted to see it anyway. It is a nice little wood. The side of the wood facing the field looked potentially more promising, apart from the fact that the EWT would need access to the field to put a box up, and we don't know that farmer at all.
We strolled down the lane to look at the neighbour's grassland, and the huge area of mown grass around the farm reservoir. They'd had a look at the area on Google earth before coming out to us, as you'd expect, and pronounced it good potential barn owl territory. Apparently a barn owl needs about 100 acres of rough grass over which to hunt, but that doesn't have to be one contiguous area. A mosaic of farm headlands, field margins, and meadows belonging to non-farming landowners who just like wildlife will do perfectly well. I was keen to get the Essex Wildlife Trust to look at our immediate area for precisely that reason, since it seemed to me that when you added together bits of grassland owned by half a dozen different people it added up to quite a lot.
They were very taken with a mature oak by the farm reservoir as a possible nest box site, and a couple of trees at the edge of a small woodland further down the hill. I think they'd been hoping that I could mark on their map where the boundaries lay, and who owned what, but while knowing that all the neighbours have bought little bits of the farm, I don't know exactly how far each stretches. However, the EWT is at the early stages of rolling out a barn owl project, and should have a leaflet ready in a month or so, so I promised that if they sent me some leaflets when they were available then I would go and talk to the neighbours and try and get their permission for the EWT to approach them. Apparently they have a policy of not cold-calling landowners. I can see they don't want to risk alienating people and being seen as interfering nosy parkers, by implication probably hell-bent on stopping people from enjoying their own land, but this must be quite a new policy, given that the first we knew of our wood being considered for designation as a local wildlife site was when a letter arrived telling us that it already had been.
When it comes to working with farmers they have a potential introduction if the farm is receiving any kind of countryside stewardship payment, or whatever those sorts of schemes are called nowadays. The wildlife trust people know the subsidy-granting people, so can ask the latter to seek permission from the farmer for the wildlife trust to approach them. The lettuce farm is signed up to something called LEAF, which promotes environmentally friendly farming. Farmers have over the years developed an image as hedge-grubbing, money-grabbing, heartless, hard-nosed businessmen, with no interest in wildlife, but this seems to me unfair. It is such a tough way to make a living that it you didn't like the countryside you probably wouldn't bother with it. I presume the other reason for signing up to LEAF is to be able to tick boxes in supermarket's environmental and sustainability audits of their supply chain. Anyway, I thought that the lettuce farmer had every reason to welcome an owl box or three, what with his LEAF membership and his urgent need to be seen to be a good citizen so that he can get permission for his polytunnels.
I mentioned to the wildlife officer that I'd wondered if the grass around the reservoirs wasn't cut rather early, from a wildlife point of view, and kept rather short, since it was a big area that didn't seem to be doing much with practically no flowers at this time of year, and the wildlife officer agreed wistfully that it could be made a lot more interesting. It's great fun planning how to manage other people's land better than they seem to be doing it themselves, and I can see why the EWT has to be careful about how it approaches landowners.
I think we have left it that a local owl expert, who has put up hundreds of boxes in the Tendring peninsular, will come and talk to us and see if there is a good spot for one. I'm unclear about whether this will happen before we've had a chance to try and get the neighbours interested, in case their trees are better than ours. I would really like to have a box in our meadow, if we could, because if an owl took up residence I'd see more of it than if it was nesting in a box on the other side of the farm, and I should like to see it, flying along the edge of the wood at dusk. But obviously from a conservation point of view the important thing is that the boxes are in good places for the owls, and it doesn't matter a blind jot whether I can see them or not. Still, the wildlife officer said that if boxes were put up he confidently expected owls to find them within a year or two, so it sounds as though something will happen. I asked whether barn owls and tawnies minded each other, but apparently they don't really. They nest in different types of site, and eat different prey, barn owls living almost exclusively on voles while tawnies go for mice. Pest control is actually one of the selling points that the wildlife trust uses when persuading farmers to let them put owl boxes up. I don't know whether voles eat lettuces particularly, but I expect the lettuce farmer would rather have fewer voles than more of them.
Addendum The Systems Administrator is now able to sit up and watch sport on the TV, but still gets dizzy walking about. It was an extremely nasty bug.
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