Our work on pollinating insects has revealed how their abundance today is limiting fruit-set in hedgerow shrubs such as blackthorn and hawthorn, and landscape scale surveys provide an insight into the enormous range in abundance of wild bees across a range of sites. We have used spatial models to estimate how wild bee numbers might have changed historically, but more importantly, how their numbers could be restored through future land use change.
Six species of grasshoppers and crickets have colonised the farm, largely in response to climate change, during the first fifteen years of the project. Despite national declines in abundance of moths, our long-term monitoring shows that moth numbers have increased by more than a third at Loddington over the thirty years, with the number of species present also increasing by around 20%. Overall songbird numbers doubled within the first six years of the project and much of our research over the years has been on how songbirds use the land we are managing to produce food.
For example, song thrush nests that successfully produce young have a higher proportion of pasture grazed by sheep within their foraging range than failed nests which have more arable land. Yellowhammers change from one crop to another through the nesting season when gathering food for their young, so crop diversity within the foraging range is likely to increase survival. We also have detailed information of the diet of many birds that forage for invertebrates on productive land during the breeding season.
Our research has shown that the land that we are managing to produce food is not just supporting wildlife, but that in some cases those species are increasing in abundance, many are beneficial to food production, while others are iconic species that we appreciate in their own right. Developing methods of further improving the farmed environment to benefit this full range of species is the subject of another chapter.
