In January 2025, we kicked off our Winter Talk Series with a fascinating discussion on a new and exciting Species on the Edge project in Shetland: bumblebird crops. In this talk, we are joined by Matt Willmott from RSPB who tells us about the project, and crofters Donna Smith and Laura Sinclair who share their experiences of growing bumblebird crops on their crofts.
Watch the full talk on YouTube below. If you are interested in finding out more about the project and might even want to grow a bumblebird crop yourself, you can attend one of our two in person ‘Crofting for linties and pollinators’ events in March 2025 or you can get in touch with Species on the Edge Shetland Officer, Harry: harry.britton@rspb.org.uk
Transcript
Eilidh Ross, Species on the Edge [0:03 – 5:14]
Okeydoke. I think we can probably start going. I’ll admit people as they come in, but welcome everyone! Fantastic to see so many of you here, so welcome to the first of our Winter Series talks, Winter Walk Series, with Species on the Edge. We’re really excited for this new series, so hopefully you can join us for some more, but we’re excited to kick off with this one today. So I’ll just introduce myself, my name is Eilidh. I’m the Communications Manager for Species on the Edge, and I’ll be co-hosting this event tonight. I’ve also got Liz Peel, my colleague with me here. Liz is one of our project officers for our Argyll and Inner Hebrides area with Species on the Edge, and, yep, she’s also going to be on hand. She’ll be hosting the Q&A session at the end. There’s lots of people still coming in, so I’ll let them all in. Perfect. So yeah, it’s lovely to have you all today. You will have had a notification at the start that we’re recording, so I hope that’s OK. It’ll just be great to be able to use this in the future for anyone that can’t make it today. So yeah, feel free to leave your cameras off, to pop them on, whatever you’re most comfortable with, either way. We’ll ask you just to keep your mics off, if that’s OK, just to sort of minimise any disruptions for the speakers. We will be having a Q&A and a session at the end, so what I’ll ask is if you’ve got any questions that sort of come to you as the speakers are doing their talks, if you can pop them into the chat that would be great or, you know feel free to hold on to it and then you can ask it in the Q&A session as well. Liz will be monitoring the chat for all questions. So yeah, we’ll come to that once the speakers have done their wee bit. We’ll open it up. We’re planning on keeping the recording going for the Q&A session, just because you know some fantastic questions might be asked and some fantastic answers might be given, but if you do fancy asking a question that’s not recorded, you can just drop Lis or I a wee message on Zoom. I think, yeah, you’re able to just sort of message one person. So just let us know and then we can be aware of that. We can pop the recording off and then leave a little bit of time for you to ask your question at the end if that’s what you would like to do.
So, perfect, I think people have still been trickling in, but I think hopefully we’re pretty good to get going. I mean, people will continue trickling in, but we’ll just get into the meat of it. So yeah, so welcome! I thought I would give a wee introduction to Species on the Edgen the programme first of all, I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with the programme, but just in case there’s a few of you that haven’t come across Species on the Edge, I thought I’d just give it a wee introduction first. So Species on the Edge is a programme that’s working to support 37 of Scotland’s rarest and most vulnerable coastal and island species. So we’ve got teams in seven project areas around the country, so they’re working with local communities to help them support their local species and sort of ensure their continued presence on our shores into the future.
Now, the reason that we’re focusing in on the coasts and islands is that Scotland’s coasts and islands do provide a last stronghold, a last point of refuge for some of the UK species, but also just sort of species on a global scale. So we really need to do everything we can to protect them and and ensure that they can carry on living here and that these are safe spaces for them. So yeah, that’s what we are doing.
The exciting thing about Species on the Edge, in my opinion, we’re a partnership programme, so there’s eight conservation organisations from across the sector coming together to work together on this, this so we share staff, expertise, money so that we can really do action with the most impact and the most informed action, most effective, you know just so we can do everything we we can for these species.
So that’s the programme. There’s a lot more to it than that, I don’t want to take up too much time. If you want to find out more about the programme you can find a full the list of all 37 of our target species on our website. You can explore the areas, find the contact details of your local officers, they’re always keen for a chat. Feel free to drop them a message and find out more about the programme along with opportunities to get involved in events and stuff like that because we’ve always got stuff going on. So yeah, feel free to check out the website after this talk. It’s www.speciesontheedge.co.uk. I can put the link in the chat as well, but I’m assuming you guys will be somewhat familiar seeing as you’ve found us for this talk today. So yeah, that’s been a wee introduction to Species on the Edge, but today we’re focusing in on some exciting work that’s going on up in Shetland, which is our most northerly project area. So we’ve got some great people to come and tell us about this today. So we’ve got Laura Sinclair and Donna Smith, who are both crofters up in Shetland. And then Matt Wilmot, who’s from the RSPB. So yeah, I’m happy to hand it over to you guys. You can give a more fulsome introduction to yourself if you’d like, but I think I can leave it there from me.
Matt Willmott, RSPB [5:14 – 45:32]
Thanks very much, Eilidh. So thanks for the introduction. So, yeah, I’m Matt Willmott, RSPB Shetland Conservation Officer. You can probably tell pretty quick I’m not from Shetland, but I’ve been living here about four years now. I’ve been coming up since the late 80s, first came up with my dad, I’m a keen birder so it was a place where a lot of Southerners or Sooth Moothers, as we’re known up here, came to visit the islands and I fell in love with it. And circumstances meant that I could come and live here about four years ago. So I’m not a Shetlander, you know that you’ll hear from the crofters, from their perspective, but yeah, I’m just going to run through some exciting work that I’ve been involved with with Species on the Edge. So if I just move my slides on, hopefully they’ll work. Don’t seem to be moving. There we go.
As Eilidh said, Species on the Edge is a breath of fresh air as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been working in conservation for goodness me, 25 years now, most of that in England, but it is a breath of fresh air. It’s a really flexible scheme and it does give the opportunity for people, farmers, land owners to come into a scheme. It’s very flexible. It’s targeted. It’s based on evidence. It’s designed to provide solutions to the problems that a lot of our priority species are facing, whether that’s habitat loss, fragmentation. It focuses on species and specific project areas, and it’s this really nice collaborative approach, all those kind of organisations at the bottom of the screen there so, so it’s ourselves RSPB, Buglife, NatureScot, Butterfly Conseravtion, Plantlife [Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, Bat Conservation Trust]. They’ve all injected money into this project. So all the taxa are well represented. As Eilidh also mentioned, the project areas, this shows it on the map, Shetland, where we are is the northernmost, but the other kind of areas are also well represented, and each of those areas in consultation with communities and local wildlife groups came up with a list of species which they deemed a priority in those areas so they differ, I’ll come on to some of that now. So these are the species that are targeted under Species on the Edge in Shetland. So you can see we’ve got a good representation here. Plantain leaf beetle only occurs in one location really up on the northernmost part of the Northern Isles, up on Unst, a rare beetle. And then we’ve got the twite, lintie as Shetland folk call it, that’s what we’re going to be focusing on tonight. But then you can see there’s there’s lapwing, moss carder bumblebee. That’s the Shetland variety of bombus moscorum, which only occurs here and Orkney. Red-neck phalaropes, again 95% of the British population in Shetland. Oysterplant, which is a sort of coastal species. The endemic hawkweeds and curlew representing the sort of upland breeding wader assemblage of which we’ve got a huge number here in Shetland. So the twite project, looking at that more specifically, you can read the objective there, it’s about defining and looking into and trialling appropriate management measures that will affect twite and I’ll mention some more about the ecology of twite or lintie in a minute. But it’s absolutely key that this relies on crofters and land managers, absolutely crucial to the delivery. This is a kind of one wider landscape species. It’s not one that we can just manage for on nature reserves and so on, it needs collaboration with the crofting community and that’s what we’ve started to really benefit from here in Shetland.
So a quick lintie refresher, you’ll see that Shetland folk call them PBB, peerie brown birds or little brown jobs as we call them south of the border, but they are to those who aren’t familiar, they’re pretty small, brown streaky Finch, but on closer inspection they really are lovely, lovely looking things, especially as that bottom picture shows in the snow, it’s got a really nice buff tinge to the plumage and they do form these quite tight flocks numbering several hundred, this winter for example, and they’re quite, quite obvious. Fortunately, they are quite similar to linnets, so fortunately here in Shetland linnet is quite a scarce bird. We don’t get many here so if you see a big flock of small finches, it’s usually going to be the lintie. So take note of that as I’ll test you a bit later. Hopefully we can move on. Yeah. Yeah.
So there’s a number of species that look quite similar. We’ve got skylarks that you’ll probably all know, that’s got a sort of nice crest. Then Meadow pippets again, a sort of real PBB, a streaky brown bird. And then a red pole in the middle there and then a linnet in the middle and then a red pole at the bottom all quite similar. In terms of just a little bit about the lintie, the twite ecology, it is important just to understand a bit about what the ecology is of the lintie, because then we can conserve the species if we understand their habitat preferences. Up here in Shetland, they’re quite a coastal species, so they nest in this sort of habitat. You can see in the top very top corner of that photo, that’s Sumburgh Head right at the south end of Shetland. And they do like nesting on these kind of thrift-dominated cliff edges. They’ll build a sort of shallow cup nest right down on the ledge, anywhere where the sheep can’t access the grassland really. So they’re very much a coastal species and importantly we don’t think this habitat’s changed a great deal. So we’re pretty confident that the breeding habitat hasn’t really changed that much.
The foraging habitat, so entirely graniverous. It just means they eat seeds and early in the year, sort of April time before breeding, they like to feed in track ways or quarries and bare ground, anywhere where they can poke around looking for seed really. And then during the during the breeding season, when they’re foraging and feeding chicks, they tend to move to more, perhaps unimproved meadows, roadside verges. And critically, what we’re trying to look at with this project is tackling the lack of winter foraging areas. They will congregate, I’m sure Laura and Donna will talk about this a bit as well, around stock feeding areas, so where there’s supplementary feeding for livestock, you’ll often find groups of lintie as well. But it’s the winter bird food which we’re working on to get more delivered on in the islands.
So this is the classic kind of summer lintie feeding habitat, the kind of unimproved meadows. Important to say is well, they will use some of these, what people might consider kind of weed species, the annual species, so annual meadow grass, dandelion, so any kind of small areas within farmyards, track ways, those sorts of things can be really valuable. And part of the sort of education really and talking to crofters is about leaving some of these fairly what you might consider untidy areas where species like common sorrel, rumex, can grow as well, and leaving some of these areas can offer a really important summer feeding habitat for a twite. Thistles, we know farmers, crofters you know understandably don’t want to see a lot of thistles, but if there are small patches, perhaps nearer the buildings that can be tolerated, then this is something we encourage, so what we’ve kind of seen is, and I’ll come on to this again in a minute, is a switch more to, I’m sure Shetland isn’t on its own, speaking to colleagues and friends who live on some of the other islands throughout Scotland, you know there has been this move towards productive grassland, intensively managed silage, not very good for twite. The very nature of it, silage is cut before the grass seeds, often cut twice or even more frequently, doesn’t offer a very good habitat for twite. This traditional hay meadow is a much better habitat which I mentioned. So where it’s cut much later, flowers and grasses are allowed to seed and then you also get in this picture on the left, this was taken last year on the north part of Shetland, that shows what the Shetland folk call ‘coles’, which is an old hay field which has then been stacked up to dry and that again will offer feeding habitat for Lintie.
So with that in mind, moving on, so sown, farmed habitats, wildlife habitats, are a key delivery mechanism for improving the status and the breeding productivity of twite in Shetland. So these photos just show kind of some of the species, some of the mixes that we’ve been putting in; perennial mixes as well as cereals as well as legume-based mixes and I’ll mention more about these in a moment.
So one of the key messages really, in terms of growing these crops in the discussion, the initial discussions we have with crofters, is the importance of managing the crop, managing the crop, albeit for linties or wildlife or bumblebees, it’s still a crop, it still needs the crofters’ expertise to grow these properly. You can’t just throw seed down and expect it to germinate and grow. So it really needs a bit of TLC and getting that message across is really important. And I think what we’ll see later from both Donna and Laura is how passionate they are and how important they regard this wildlife crop. That’s really important first steps.
So understanding a bit about location, we’re learning more here; Shetland’s a really windy place so anywhere where there is a bit of shelter, and that can be really difficult here, so we tend to look, for when we first go on to a sort of crofting area, we would be looking at areas that have perhaps had a previous history of cultivation, so anywhere where, it might be old maps or anecdote or talking to the grandparents of the croft or you’re talking to themselves, it would be about understanding where they grew crops before. That’s always a good place to start.
As part of the Species on the Edge project, we’ve been taking soil tests and getting soil results at the start of the project. And we’re also going to do that at the end of the project just to understand how we’re influencing soil health; so standard kind of tests really on pH, organic matter, NP and K and so on. And the discussion needs to be there. Has that area been down to grass for a long time? Is it kind of developed to thick thatchy sward? Does it therefore need plowing or can we get by with a more min-till kind of approach? Moisture retention isn’t really an issue here, fortunately, but it does need to be thought about. I’ll mention this again later, but for example, when crops were grown last year, we had an incredibly dry spell, an incredibly dry spell in May when it was just really beautiful weather, it was quite a warm southerly wind, and the ground dried out and it was it was really dry and we didn’t rush. Crofters gave advice and again, the beauty of Species on the Edge project we could be flexible about when the seed was planted. So we didn’t really go on a lot of plots until June time.
Again, these are the kind of conversations that are really critical. Is there a weed burden? You can walk out and discuss with the crofter; is there a particular weed problem there? We need to have that discussion about overcoming that. And potentially looking at crop protection as well. And I think, I mean, for anyone who’s grown crops before, apologies if you’ve heard all this, but just understanding what equipment a crofter’s got access to, you know, have they got a seed drill? If so, how old is it? Has it been used in the last 20 years? But also things like planting depth; a lot of this seed that we’re asking crofters to grow just needs to be spread on the surface. It doesn’t need to be drilled too deep or else it won’t germinate. And again, I’ll come back to this whole discussion around seed sizes, moisture retention, really important that we have these crofting and farming discussions if we’re going to get the best outcome.
Just to give you an indication of weed species there, I mentioned in the earlier slide that some small amounts of weed are tolerated, but if we’re getting a crofter to grow a wildlife crop, the last thing we want is a huge profusion of weeds and unwanted species. I know some of these produce seed. I know some of them might be beneficial to linties but if you get a whole crop of undesirables, it’s a sure thing that it will put a crofter off from, you know, and it’ll damage enthusiasm early on.
I’ve just put this in, this can be a problem again with seed quality. So with the project here in Shetland we’ve been working with a local seed supplier, a well-known, respected seed supplier, they won’t mind me saying their name Shearers of Orkney, who have dealt with crofters in Shetland for many, many years, and the importance of seed quality is really important and if you don’t kind of get the seed from a reputable supplier there can be problematic species like rogue millet appearing in the seed. I mentioned some of the need for this kind of crop husbandry I guess and this is also so important post emergence. So when the crop is coming through the ground, it’s been drilled correctly or broadcast and rolled, it’s important then to make sure you keep an eye on what’s happening, so to get crofters to go out and inspect regularly, give us a call, having that link with the crofter is really crucial. Is there problems with slugs or flea beetle? In Shetland, we get big flocks of native rock doves – rabbits and geese can cause a problem as well – and understanding how the crop will look, if it looks yellow, you know a lot of you on the call might know this, it might be have a problem with nitrogen, and again, to look at the weeds. So it’s really important post-emergence to go out and have a chat with the crofter and I think Laura in particular will cover some of this.
So greylag geese in Shetland are a big problem so we may need things like scarers, treating it like a crop, and, bottom left there, rock doves as well, they can be a real problem, so potentially going out, scaring them off, shooing them off the crop is something that crofters have had to do here.
Just a bit about the species that we’ve been kind of getting crofters to sow, so a mix of cereals, winter wheat on this occasion, quite big seed, good for bunting some of the larger bird species, barley grows quite well here as well, that’s another one that we’ve been getting crofters to put in. Millets is quite attractive to a lot of birds, it doesn’t grow very well here, it kind of gets bashed by the wind early on, so it can be incorporated into a Shetland mix, but we haven’t found it grows very well. Again, part of the beauty of the project is that we can try some of this stuff and begin to see which species work and which don’t. And that’s good. A big deliverer for biodiversity is kale – nice shot of the seed pods. Kale is a biannual, so produces seed in the second year. Can be challenging to establish quite well, can be difficult. It does get loved by all the kind of species we don’t want like pigeons and deer and so on. And it is a hungry crop, so having that discussion around have crofters got access to organic farmyard manure or bagged nitrogen or NPK. It’s really quite important to have those discussions early on. It is a nice all-rounder, most farmland bird species, there’s been a lot of work done by RSPB over the years looking at what species like what crops and kale comes out top, really, it really is a nice one. And I think Laura and Donna will agree that it’s a nice one to have in because certainly in Shetland with the wind it does provide some nice structure, it holds species up. So the other species that are in the mix, it can come through and just hold them up and it provides that nice structure and in year one, it’s a really nice nectar source, it’s a lovely yellow flower and produces a really good nectar source.
Another couple of good species to deliver, which provide good delivery, is fodder radish. That’s the one in the bottom left with the seed pods there and then linseed which will probably be familiar with the blue flower on the right which produces these small round kind of seed heads, both really, really good for farmland, for croft birds.
Fodder radish, just a bit more on that, it can take over but it is this really good deliverer here. It does like to stay off the ground as well even with sort of 80, 90 mile an hour winds – we seem to get those every week up here – and it does stay upright. Even if it sort of goes over slightly, it still has a tendency to stay off the ground and the seeds dry out and it becomes really accessible for birds. And it’s quite useful because it can be late sown. So if we get a particularly dry spell, like I mentioned in May, it can go in even in June and even into July and it will deliver that following winter.
Linseed, again, pretty straightforward to establish, wide range of birds feed on it, it offers some nice nectar provision beneficial for inverts as well.
Quinoa, or “keen-wah” as a farmer said to me, if you eat it, they call it “keen-wah”, but I call it “quin-oh-ah” because I don’t eat it. But again, that’s one we’re looking at trialling here. I don’t think it will grow very well in Shetland, to be honest. I don’t think that photo was taken here, I think that was somewhere else but it does tend to fall over with the first blast of wind and I couldn’t see that lasting very long into a Shetland winter.
That’s mustard, so again, a nice one, a good deliverer. It’s got proven ability to produce seed for birds well into the winter. It’s quite interesting, I’d encourage you to taste it if you want to. It does taste bitter like you think it probably should. Birds tend to use the other species first and then will move on to mustard and we’ve seen that, or come on to it, with some of our observations this winter by volunteers in Shetland have seen birds moving on to mustard much later. Good advantage with it is, again, it can be sown as a recovery type mix a bit later on.
Just moving on to the last couple of species, so phacelia is a really nice one. This seems to grow really well in Shetland, it does nicely. It’s got those distinctive leaves and it’s a really nice indicator that the sown mix is growing. If you go out with a crofter early on post germination you can see those leaves growing through and it’s a good sign that the mix is growing. And it’s really good for invertebrates. It’s well used by bumblebees and hover flies and things like that. And visually, it’s absolutely fantastic, it’s a really nice one to get people started and enjoy it.
So we’ve kind of adapted, we’ve worked with um Shearers of Orkney to come up with a mix, this bespoke, what we call, quite nice term, ‘bumblebird’ mix for Shetland, and this is a mix of cereals and seed-producing species but it’s also got wildflowers in it as well. Agricultural varieties, so it’s not expensive red clover, it’s kind of short-lived cultivars. But what this does is provide a two-year mix and this is what seems to be taken up really well. And I’ll come on to the reasons why in a minute. But it’s a nice mix of all those species that I’ve gone through and it does seem to be growing well here.
And I think we can all see kind of what goes on above ground; it’s easy to look and see the use of the crop by birds and invertebrates and so on. But actually what’s going on underground is really important as well and how it can really, how these crops can really help soil health. So this diagram shows it quite nicely, showing the sort of rooting depths, the differing rooting depths of a lot of those species. And this slide talks about how it interacts with the mycorrhizae in the soils, how it can increase and improve organic matter and kind of the different rooting depths mean the species become almost companions to each other using different nutrients at different soil depths.
And then the other, I mentioned about wildflower meadows, they need to be treated quite differently. So another sort of project, another thing that Species on the Edge is keen to promote is this idea of hay meadow or longer term grassland management and grassland recreation, very different to the two-year flower mix. So this is a longer term objective, really. These perennial grasslands, all those species are kind of perennial, much longer term, and here in Shetland, we’re working with the roads network, for example, to start harvesting seed from the roadsides and the meadows to actually then use, so we know it’s native seed, we know it’s locally provenant and it’s come from Shetland, but this is used to establish these longer term hay meadows.
And just very quickly, so a perennial mixm if you’re sowing a sort of perennial grass mix, so that’s a wildflower meadow, the critical thing is mowing that in the first year. It may seem counterproductive, but actually mowing that newly sown sward in the first year is very, very crucial. So if you think about sort of mowing your lawn, you’re never going to kill a perennial by mowing, so things like daisies will keep coming back in your lawn, but if you mow, what you will do is reduce the competition from the grasses that might be there and you’ll allow the wildflowers to get through and get established. Then you might move to a late hay cut. But initially in that first year of establishment, it’s really important that you mow it regularly. As soon as it gets up to ankle height, it needs mowing but that’s very much just in just in year one.
So I said I was going to test you, before I move on to the last bit of my talk, but there’s too many people on the call to ask if anyone knows the lintie, so I’ll just give you a few minutes just to have a look at those pictures.
There is a difficult one thrown in as well. But anyway, I’ll tell you the answers because we probably haven’t got time. So there’s skylark in the top left where I’m looking. Then there’s a male linnet bottom left, red pole in the middle, meadow pippet down the bottom and the lintie is in the top right with the yellow beak. But the difficult one on the right is the juvenile linnet, so that looks very similar, but that hasn’t got the yellow beak so hopefully you might be getting familiar with it.
So just going back very quickly now to look at the actual twite project in Shetland. so I mentioned the objective, I mentioned how dependent we are on crofters and land managers and I can’t stress that enough. I really can’t stress that enough. So in Shetland, probably I mentioned, we’ve got a similar problem which has happened probably, I mean, when I first came to Shetland in the late 80s, early 90s, there were still a lot of crops growing. This picture is an archive picture from 1962 showing what was commonplace across the islands. But even in the late 80s, early 90s, there was still a lot of crops grown here. So it’s relatively recent that this patchwork quilt has been replaced by a plain blanket. I love that. That’s in Lughton Johnston’s Naturalist Shetland book. I think that really kind of nicely illustrates what’s kind of happened here in the islands. And again, this is a picture from one of the books from the Shetland Library which shows the voar which Shetlanders call spring, this would have been a typical scene on many, many crofts up here, going out sowing the crops in the spring.
And again, just to show it visually quite nicely, these are from the Shetland Museum. This shows, actually in the top left is Laura’s croft actually way back, which shows the number of cultivated rigs and the bottom right here shows stooks, which is oats which have been harvested and left to dry in these kind of stooks. And these would have presented brilliant opportunities for foraging birds, for things like linties and other species, sparrows, buntings and so on. And it’s really interesting and I find it interesting trawling through some of the Shetland archives. This is from an island where we’ve been working with the local community on the Out Skerries which is a tiny group of islands, population less than 30, right on the east side of Shetland. It’s all grass now, no crops grown at all, but this shows the network of old rigs and they’ve all got individual names. So all of these would have had crops in 40, 50, 60 years ago. And it just shows how the landscape has changed really.
So with the project we’re doing here, what progress have we made? So in the last year, we’re working closely with crofters and we’ve got 26 wildlife crops now sown across Shetland. Some of these were under the agri-environment and climate scheme, but most are down to new crofters who’ve come in, have heard what we’re promoting and have shown an interest and really come on board.
We’ve got an option. I mentioned our bumblebird mix but we’ve also got an option which is an agri-environment compliant one-year mix. And we’re also developing a grazable option now. I think one of the other key crofters here, Duncan Grey, might be on the call and he put forward an idea for a grazed option and we’re developing that and that’s something we’re hoping to roll out this year. And critically, what we’re trying to do is sort of encourage crofters to see this as not just beneficial to wildlife, but something that might be integrated into the crofting system, beneficial to the business.
So this map, we want to fill this in. I mean, this just shows where we’ve got a distribution, we’ve got good distribution across the islands right from the north in Unst across to Fettler and then we’ve got a poor show on Yell at the moment, but Yell’s quite dominated by peatland. But we’re hoping to change that. And we are talking with various growers at the moment. But you can see we’ve got a good spread across the islands. And the idea is to just increase the numbers of people participating.
I think I’ve touched on this already, but this discussion is really good to have with a crofter early on about the importance of not just the above ground biodiversity, but how it can help the crofting system and help soil. So adding organic matter, that list of species from the two-year mix with clover in it, with those sorts of species which can fix nitrogen, which can be added to the soil after two years. All that biomass can be incorporated into the soil and it really can help improve organic matter content.
The other feedback we’ve received already is that this offers a nice opportunity for crofters to get on top of weeds and soil-borne disease. We all probably know and people, our grandparents would have known it’s not good to grow tatties, for example, on the same plot. It makes them vulnerable to various soil-borne diseases. So to have a crop which is effectively acting as a break crop can be can be very beneficial. And I think that last bullet point has been something which has been a real nice eye-opern for us working on the project here. It’s really been a nice connection with cultural heritage. The amount of times we go onto a croft and then we’ll be talking to perhaps the crofter’s parents or grandparents and they’ll be talking about how they remember cultivating the soil and growing crops and it really kind of sparks up a nice conversation around the table. So that’s been a lovely sort of addition.
Just showing again some images which kind of show what we’re doing. Again the value of growing these crops and the importance of them.
I just quickly wanted to move on to the next little bit just to show that we’re not asking for really big areas either. I mean it’s quite nice tonight, the two crofters we’ve got. Laura’s sown a big crop on her croft and Donna’s done a relatively small bit, but they’re both really important and really crucial and really delivered the results.
And this kind of shows, this is the Out Skerries again, the arial I showed you where all the rigs were on that map, and that area, that brown area just above the boat, just to the middle-left of the screen is a cultivated area and it’s not very big but it will deliver. So we’re not asking potentially for huge areas. It can be quite small kind of cultivated bits that still deliver.
Just another kind of really nice story about Out Skerries, Harry Britton who’s the Species on the Edge Project Officer Lead here in Shetland, one of the project officers, Harry and I were over on the Out Skerry’s earlier last year and we got chatting to a young chap who was doing up a tractor. And that’s in the left there. And he was in his shed and we started talking and we said, why are you doing it? He said, because I just like old machinery. So we said, well, what are you going to do with it when you’ve done it up? And he said, well, I don’t know, really. Maybe plant some potatoes. So we said, well, would you consider planting a wildlife crop with your tractor? And he was, yeah, sure. He’s only in his early 20s this chap. He’s done the tractor up fantastically well. And he sent me a wonderful WhatsApp image and video just before Christmas of him riding it around the Out Skerries. Brilliant. And he’s got a plough, he’s got a harrow, he’s got a drill. So he’s set to go and help us with the project. So that kind of engagement with the community, how do you put value on that? It’s absolutely brilliant.
This is, I won’t steal Donna’s thunder, but this is Donna’s croft and it shows another nice kind of way that we’re working with the community to get people involved in the project. So when we give the crofters the incentive, bit of financial incentive, to go and grow wildlife crop, we also give them the flexibility to grow something that they want at the edge of that. So you can see in this photo, this is a small rig at Donna’s croft, where we got the land cultivated, we grew a wildlife crop on the left and on the right, she can use that for her own produce so for neeps, tatties or whatever it wants to be. So getting that kind of hook in as well, discussing that with the local community, has been something that’s worked really well. And just going back to Skerries, the Out Skerries, when we get crops going in this spring, one area they want to put over to tatties and neeps and they want to grow their own veg and then they want to market that through the local stores on the mainland in Vidlin, they want to market that as Skerry’s tatties, which is again a really nice part of the project that we didn’t really think about until we got going with things.
And then finally for me is the other people we’re working with, people who are particularly interested in the Shetland oats. So this is a particularly rare genotype of oat, which is only found in Shetland. And trying to get crofters to grow it has proved difficult in the past, but on the back of our project with Species on the Edge we’re working with a lady, Eve Junson, who’s passionate about growing Shetland oats, because she makes things with it so she’ll weave things and make baskets and so on. And part of that is we’re working with Eve. So we’re actually getting crofters to grow native Shetland oats alongside our wildlife crops. So again, another nice thing that we didn’t really think about until we got the projects rolling.
So I think, yeah, just very quickly, sorry, nearly finished for me. Just finally, the other thing we’re doing, which is a really exciting, fantastic part of this project is we’ve actually got Harry now who’s a qualified bird ringer and we’re working with the Shetland Club and the British Trust for Ornithology to start a colour ringing project in Shetland. So the qualified ringers have to be licensed. They go out and ring some of the twite because we want a better understanding of what’s happening to the birds here so when they’ve been feeding in the crops where do they go? When they’ve depleted that seed, where do they move? There’s been a little bit of work done about a decade ago where birds in Orkney were ringed and they were found to be moving to Caithness on the mainland and other birds that were ringed as part of that project on the Hebrides were moving on to mainland Scotland. So we know they’ll move large distances but what we wanted to do is kind of prove that, we know, we thought that they’d be moving around and we’re excitingly starting to get some evidence of that.
So just going back to this map. The ringing only started a few weeks ago, but we’ve already had visual recoveries. We’ve already had people, I myself have seen a couple of birds. Other birds have been spotted and we’ve already found that birds have moved from south Shetland about 40 miles north and even further northeast. So we sort of knew what was happening, but we need evidence if we’re going to sort of influence policy with this work and potentially get agri-environment schemes changed and so on. We need to have evidence. NatureScot and ministers from ScotGov and so on won’t take any notice unless we’ve got good evidence. We’re starting to get that put together now with this ringing project.
So just finally, the next steps then, we’ve got a twite workshop coming up in Shetland here, well we’ve got two, for crofters, skeptics, people who might have heard about it and might be a bit reluctant to be involved and crucially, the contractors, the guys and girls who’ve been out sowing the mixes and getting the land ready for cultivation, they’re invited to these meetings. So we’ve got two workshops coming up. We’ve already had over the winter, Harry and I have been out with numerous crofters across the islands, we’ve already got around, I think, 10 to a dozen crofters really interested in putting the mixes in. So fantastic.
Species on the Edge, a key part of their role is to give ongoing advice. So Harry is contactable if anyone wants Harry’s contact details, they can come through us on this and he’ll be happy to give advice and if you’re in Shetland, he’ll come out and visit and provide tailored, bespoke advice for your individual crop. And the ongoing ringing project, which is all very exciting. And that was what a crofter said to me, an elderly crofter said to me, she said: “It was a bit like connecting with the past to help secure the future.” And that kind of sums it up to me. So, and who knows? We might be able to get Shetland looking a bit like that in 2025. Who knows?
So that’s enough from me. Thanks very much for listening. I’m going to pass over, Donna’s sat next to me. So I think Donna’s going to go first. It’s over to the crofters and this is the only way it will work.
Donna Smith [45:39 – 57:39 ]
Hello, everybody. You’ll see from my accent that I am from Shetland. So I hope if you’re not from Shetland that you understand me. I’ll try and speak my best English or ‘kanap’, as we say in Shetland.
So the croft that I’m going to speak about, it’s my family croft. It’s quite a small croft that was bought by my granddad in the 1940s, so just after the Second World War, then he bought the croft and set up his family there. And then my dad took it over and then it’s in the process of being passed down to me.
When my granddad had it, I still remember it was run as a very traditional Shetland croft where we had the cows and, Matt’s going to do the slides. So we had the cows, we grew some crops – there was oats and there was potatoes – there were sheep, there was chickens, hens. And as you can see from the photo here, this was actually looking out the front door of their house and the cows, the milk cows, they were used for milk. And the ground is quite flowery, there’s a lot of flowers, just below that as well, you can see that there’s an area where crops were grown. I think that’s the tractor with hay on it maybe in the background as well. A man on the island Burra which is off the mainland and just in the distance there you can see a sort of a gap between the two isles, there’s a bridge there now, so that came in 1973, so this photo is taken, or I think it was 1972 the bridge came, so it was taken before then.
Once my dad took it over, for various reasons the croft changed a bit. They got rid of the cows, they stopped growing the crops and it basically was put over to sheep. Really the sheep are easier to work with. He was working full time as a teacher and really just like how the whole of Shetland and a lot of the mainland has gone as well the crops became the less important thing. They used to grow the oats to feed to the cows and then they would grow lots of Shetland kale, Shetland cabbage just to feed to the cows and the sheep as well. And so basically the whole area was much more diverse than it is now. The sheep, Matt always calls them land maggots because you say they basically just eat all the flowers and everything. And it makes the grass basically just, I mean, it looks very nice and it’s all green but there’s not much diversity to it.
When I started to think about taking over the croft and like, what am I going to do with it, one of the things I would like to do more is diversify and make it more suitable for wildlife, to put it back a bit more to where it used to be. And just with speaking to Matt, then he was telling me about this project, about putting in crops that would then mean that there was more habitat suitable for bees and for the birds. The biggest problem we have on the croft is it’s a 12 acre croft, it runs from the top of the hill right down to the sea. The soil is very thin so there’s only a few areas where it’s flat enough that it could be ploughed and the soil is you know deep enough. And he [Matt] suggests that just doing a little bit so, can I go back to that slide that you showed me, if you go to the one you showed before. We cannae back. So we decided to do just a little bit in the kale yard, so the kale yad is in the area that’s usually around the host that, in the past grew the cabbages in and the vegetables. And it was cultivated for many, many years. And in recent years, I’ve just had a little bit for vegetables and then the rest of it was put over to a hay meadow. We still grow our own hay so that’s a bit of diversity. And so what was in the kale yard, we were just growing hay, but what we were finding was it was getting quite mossy and really we were at the stage where we needed to do something to, you know, to improve the soil there.
So we decided that, or Matt and I decided we were going to put in this crop. And so then the biggest issue was how were we going to do it because it’s not a big area, I think the area is about 13 meters by 16 meters, so it’s no a big area. I’m quite an advocate of the no dig method, which I tend to use on the vegetables. And I was quite keen to do that but when we thought about it practically, you need quite a lot of plastic to cover it for a start. We only started thinking about it early last year so there wasn’t enough time to do that. Also, it’s extremely windy where I live, so we would have needed lots and lots of tires to cover it to make sure that plastic didn’t blow away. So we thought then that the best solution was to plough it. So this here is the old tractor that belongs to the croft. It’s old Massey Ferguson, about 70 years old, still going strong. My dad, he’s the tractor driver, so I think the biggest issue was then persuading him to actually come and plough a bit because he’s, I mean he grew up on the croft, that was really hard work. They probably saw lots of years where the crops failed and it was you know really disappointing. So I think he thought we were totally mad when we said we were going to try and grow this crop. So anyway, he got the tractor out after a bit of persuasion and we eventually got it ploughed. It was quite, it was very hard because the ground had gone really mossy, so when we first started ploughing it we could hardly even get the plough through it. We just dig it up. We tried lots of different sort of ways of doing it trying to cut with a shovel before we started, I think we ended up doing that, didn’t we? And the other thing was we wet it with the hose as well. So once we got it a bit wetter, then the plough went through it a lot better. But this ground hasn’t been cultivated probably for about 30 years or something like this, this part of it. So we got it ploughed, just that bit on the right we’re looking at, this is the area that we ploughed for the crops – I think we hadn’t quite finished it at that point – and the left hand side is where the vegetables are and you can just see the bridge in the distance there. So the position that we’re looking at isn’t too far from the original one that you looked at where the cows were.
At the top as well, that’s all the rhubarb plants. Rhubarb grows extremely well in Shetland. And it’s been quite good in my business because one of the things I do is I produce yarn from the sheep and also naturally dye it as well. And so I use the rhubarb leaves for that and so that’s been really good. So yeah, so the next thing we had to do was, as you can see here, the ground is much smoother than it was just when it was just ploughed. So we went over it with harrows and just took the quad because you know the harrows are quite small so our neighbour came and did that and basically just to sort of break up the surface a bit more so that we could sow the seeds and they wouldn’t get lost and blow away.
The next thing we then did was sowing the seeds, so Matt he came and sowed them by hand. And we then found, and I think we were really watching the forecast and it had been quite dry, it was a dry spell of weather in May. And we were watching the forecast like a hawk. Then we could see it was coming, quite a lot of rain so we were up till about 11 o’clock one night trying to get the seed in before the rain came which I think any crofter will understand exactly what that’s like. So we were delighted, of course, the rain came. But then the biggest problem we had was the rock doves, they found the seed. And so we tried to just add this bit of fabric on a sting to try and stop them from coming which worked I think to an extent. We ended up spreading some topsoil on it as well because we were finding that the seeds just, because we did it by hand, just sat on the surface. And I had got a couple of ton of topsoil for the garden so we spread some of that on, on top of the seed and that really made a difference. So you can see there that they’re just starting to come through and that was very exciting, when you start seeing something growing and so this is just a couple of months later – would it have been as much as that? Yeah, a couple of months later in the summer, again, just looking from a similar view. And this, when the sun was shining, this was just absolutely full of bumblebees; you could hear them buzzing away and also the birds were obviously a lot more of them around as well.
So yeah, so it’s been really exciting to do it. The thing that I kind of thought to begin with, it’s quite a small area, is it going to make any difference? But I think the main thing I keep coming back to is that quote that Matt read out by Lughton Johnston where he says that it’s as if the patchwork quilt has been replaced by a grey blanket and I kind of felt if I can even put one of that squares back onto the patchwork quilt that’s making a bit of a difference and if everybody can do a little square that’s going to make a massive difference to the diversity and hopefully we’ll see more wildlife.
And it was really exciting a couple of weekends ago that we, well, Matt heard the twite, so of course we rushed down to have a look and then when we looked with the binoculars we saw two ringed ones and it turned out that they had come from Laura’s croft. So great to see that they’re moving between the crops as well.
I think that was maybe all I was going to say. Yeah. So I’ll pass you on to Laura now.
Laura Sinclair [57:39 – 1:14:06]
Thank you. So hi, everyone. As Matt and Donna have said, I’m Laura and I’m just here to tell you a bit about my experience in participating in this Species on the Edge programme.
So I’m going to start by telling you a bit about our croft, a reflection over the last 10 months and then move on to why we decided to be in the project.
So our croft, which you can see some of from the photo on this slide, I normally refer to it as Firva and it’s made up of multiple crofts which are either owned or tenanted by my parents. Firva is the name of my parents’ house and given that each croft has a different name it’s easier just to refer to the collective as Firva rather than give you all the individual names.
So in total, Firva extends to approximately 58 hectares and the crofts are mainly located in South Scousburgh and Spiggy. I’m not sure how many of you on this call tonight are familiar with the area, but we roughly sit in between St Ninians Island and Quendale which is on the west coast of Shetland South Mainland. We have 12 suckler cows, which are mainly Limousine crosses, and we have 130 breeding sheep which are mainly some form of Shetland Cheviot cross. I also have a small flock of Suffolk ewes. I’ve had to leave my mom on Suffolk duty tonight because we’ve got one left to lamb so fingers crossed she holds in until the end of this.
Kind of similar to Donna’s Croft, we used to grow tatties, some neaps and oats, but now the only thing we have is a silage crop, on top of the livestock.
Firva is a typical Shetland family crofting enterprise. It’s primarily worked by me and my parents with my teenage stepdaughter and four-year-old daughter having an active role. My sister is based on the mainland, so even though she’s not physically here, we still often go to her for advice and input as often that’s quite valuable.
Then if you go on to the next slide. If it’s going to work. There we go. So just moving on to the actual project itself, I just thought it’d be helpful to put some slides up showing you how it’s developed and evolved over the last 10 months.
So this first slide really just shows you the chosen area. So once we’d chosen the area – we used a feeding area for our ewes pre-lamming last March and April – and then once the ewes came in for lambing we measured and marked off the site. The site is approximately 0.9 acres, so slightly bigger than Donna’s, and then we got the contractor in to come and spray the area. It was important that it was completely sterile before the seed mix went in, just to make sure there was no other contamination with other species growing.
My dad then applied a good helping of farmyard manure which lay on for a couple of weeks before the contractor came back to cultivate the area and plant the seed. And if you go on to the next slide, you can see it’s starting to grow in its early stages. I think we were a bit worried if it would grow or not because we planted it quite late but we just kept everything crossed and thankfully it sprung up.
And then if you go on to the next slide. Once it became established we were almost overwhelmed by it in terms of colour, smell and sound. It was just buzzing with bumblebees and other pollinators throughout the summer. It was just quite a nice sight. And it stayed this way until almost the first gales in September, and then if you go on to the next slide, this shows it then going to seed which sort of happened in November, December time, and that is when the twite arrived in their numbers, so instead of buzzing with bees it was chirping with twite which was also nice to see and it was a relief to see the twite come because we’d had a few twite on the croft, but never the number that Matt said would come. And you can see on some of those photos that the seed pods have been chiselled away and that’s how the twites eat the seeds out of the pods.
And then if you go into the next slide. It’s going to work. You’ll see that since the turn of the year, it looks completely different than what it looked like in the summertime. It’s just dulled away and it’s just quite brown. But you can see the green kale peeping through, which is still there.
And then if you go on to the next slide. So I suppose most of the crofters and farmers on this call will want to know why we signed up for it. So I thought I’d break this down into the pros and cons: what we thought was in it for us and any associated risks we thought.
So taking the pros or the benefits first, the first one I have on the slide there is improvement: so parts of our silage crop were in need of being reseeded; some parts we’d had reduced yields on; we’d had a problem with rabbits on some of it; we’ve had issues with thistles growing on little bits of it; and because it hadn’t been cultivated or reseeded in a long time, the ground was quite compacted and hard so it really was in need of some sort of cultivation to sort of rejuvenate some life back into the ground. So our machinery and apparatus were no longer fit for purpose, basically because they were just too old and most of it needed maintenance and repair and also a lot of it wasn’t compatible with our tractor. So we did need to get a contractor in to do the cultivation and the planting.
I therefore a thought that it might be more efficient if the contractors could do work on a reseed and the twite crop at the same time. And that is how I sold it to Team Firva. We would sacrifice a smallish parcel of land and reseed a larger area adjacent to it. So it’ll be an all in all investment in Firva. And that takes me on to the next point I’ve got on the slide, which is investment.
The project gave us the opportunity for silage, land and soil improvements that instigated us to reseed an area which ultimately led us to an improved silage crop and improved soil structure.
I should say that the silage reseed is not part of the Species on the Edge programme, we just ran it in tandem with it.
The type of mix used in the twite crop in theory is meant to improve the soil quality and organic matter. Therefore, when we come to integrate that back into the croft, whether it’s for silage or a different type of crop, we shouldn’t have to add much to it and the soil should be a good quality, so we should be able to hit the ground running. As Matt said, we are monitoring the soil quality on a regular basis, jut so that we can have evidence or quantifiable data to show that this actually works and hopefully we can report on that at a later date.
The next reason for me wanting to do it was just the innovative side of it. This is a pilot scheme so we can have a direct input into trialling things and providing feedback to show real results. As far as I understand, I think Matt touched on it earlier, twite haven’t been ringed or monitored in Shetland until this project so it’s been really exciting to experience this firsthand.
And then the final point on my slide is flexibility and this was one of the main attractions for me as well. Like some of you on the call, we were previously involved in agri-environment climate schemes but we found these too prescriptive and completely out of touch with the reality of crofting. For example, we found the restrictions on when you could spread manure and cut your silage unworkable. Often the ground would be too wet for the spreading of manure and often the crop would be too far gone when it came to the time to cut it.
In contrast, this new pilot scheme offers us the flexibility to trial ideas, adapt and make decisions and alterations based on our own individual circumstances. It’s not one size fits all. I feel this project is a prime example of how flexibility can work to deliver results. I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but our crop wasn’t planted until the end of June. This wasn’t planned, but was mainly the result of the weather and the availability of the contractors to come and do the work. We were almost a month behind Donna’s and much later than the other crofters participating in the project. I think this has been beneficial as our crop was still delivering for the pollinators in September when the other crofts were starting to seed. The seed available throughout Shetland under this project has been ready and available at different times for the twite which I think in turn has sustained them for a longer period of time. But I’m not the expert on that. I’m just a crofter so that’s just an observation.
And then if you can go on to the next slide. In this next slide, I’ve just touched on the disadvantages. So my first hurdle was persuading the rest of the team to get on board with this trial and agree to it. And generally speaking, everyone was quite happy and curious to be part of it. So that was good. The next obstacle I had, or issue I had, was sort of the status quo, so this was breaking the status quo if you like. Planting the twite mix and treating it like a crop on Firva was completely against the grain of what my parents, grandparents and their forebears would have done. My nana often referred to it as a rig of weeds. But it was also just being brave enough, I think, to do something different from the other local crofters in the surrounding area. So that was quite a big challenge, but I’m glad we did it and it’s paid off.
Then the obvious disadvantage is giving up the piece of land. Our black-baled silage is crucial for feeding our cattle and sheep for nearly half the year, obviously depending on the weather and how long they’re inside. So giving up almost an acre of silage land did have to be considered carefully. There was also the risk that the reseed would fail, which would put us in a real predicament. Thankfully, the reseed thrived and I’m hoping, keeping everything crossed, that we have enough silage bales to keep us going to the end of lambing and the cows going out in late spring.
And then the other disadvantage, which I didn’t actually pop on the slide, was just the practicalities of it all, and Matt touched on this a little bit in his talk. The area must be fenced off for two years so we have therefore had to put electric fencing around our site to keep the sheep and cattle off. I didn’t see this as a nuisance because when we thought about the area of land we sort of placed it on the croft boundary, so we really only had one boundary to fence off. It wasn’t, as I said, a huge nuisance, but I think it’s important to mention and if anyone is considering doing this, I would recommend choosing an area which is going to have the least impact on the croft when you think about having to fence it off and any other things that might be individual or specific to your own croft.
And then the next slide. So this next slide has sort of touched on things that I thought we could benefit from, so basically opportunities for us as crofters. And I am a strong believer in working together and sharing knowledge and learning from one another and I feel this project has given us as the crofters the opportunity to work with conservation bodies such as RSPB and hopefully this means that this will give us all a louder voice to influence future policy, particularly if we’re all speaking from the same hymn sheet.
And personally, I also feel it’s encouraged me to connect with other crofters and speak to them and learn from them, not just about this project, but just about other croft-related issues, which I found beneficial.
The other point I’ve got on there is just the learning experience. I really wanted to expand my knowledge and understanding of Species on the Edge, the types of species that were protected, the types of flowers, and I also wanted my young daughter to be involved in that and she’s been really interested in learning about the flowers and the bees and things like that. So that’s been quite encouraging to see. And if some people on the call might know me, I’m not really into machinery or arable work, I’m really a livestock person, a sheep and coo lady, I suppose so I thought it was an opportunity to learn about the arable side, of crops and machinery which I still need to learn a lot more on but it’s definitely been a good start.
And then the other point I thought about is that this is a pilot scheme, so we as crofters can have a direct input into trialling things and providing feedback and show results. I know a lot of crofters probably aren’t very happy with the way things are going in terms of policy and future payments and stuff, but there’s no point in complaining unless you can do something about it. And I think this is a good way to actually be involved and try and influence future policy.
And also, I think it’s a positive example that crofters, we’re not the bad guys. We’re happy to work towards a common goal within reason. And many of us with our current practices support diverse ecosystems. It shows that we can and are willing to work together.
And then the final point I had on this slide was about future support. So as we all know, future support is heavily weighted towards the environment and I thought this would give us as team Firva a head start in understanding that for when it comes.
And then the next slide, please, Matt. So the final thing to talk about is just the possible risks I thought that we were kind of exposing ourselves to by signing up for this project.
And the first and probably most obvious one is failure. What if both the twite crop and reseed of silage crop failed? Thankfully, we had a good yield on the reseed So I’m under a lot less pressure from my dad and Matt and his colleagues are happy with the twite crops. So that has been a success so far.
But I think I need to caveat that by saying with the Species on the Edge project you’re not penalized if it doesn’t work, provided it’s not your fault, obviously. So that kind of gives you a bit of reassurance with that.
The other risk that my family were quite worried about was the invasion of unwanted and non-native species. Matt touched on this a little bit during his presentation. We have monitored any unwanted weeds and to date this hasn’t caused any concern and we’ll just have to see what year two brings. We will also need to monitor if the other plants come back, such as the fodder, radish and phacelia, which Matt also mentioned earlier.
And then the final sort of risk, or it’s actually a real risk we’re facing at the moment, is rabbits and geese. I imagine all of you are familiar with them. So you’ll see on the slide, it’s the photo on the right hand side, that was the rabbits right at the beginning. They were quite keen to nibble on the new shoots of the crop. Thankfully, they didn’t persist and for reasons unknown to me they sort of went off. Maybe it was to the reseed or the other silage they went to nibble on, it’s maybe more tastier. So we managed to overcome that. But we now have a problem with geese, which is the other two photos. You’ll see that they’re going for the kale. They’re basically just stripping it and just really destroying it. They’ve had quite an impact on the lower half of the field, but the top half of the field is okay and we’ve put skaters up and we try and constantly go out and scare them but I guess if any of you will know, geese aren’t that scared anymore. So it will be interesting to see how the kale bounces back next year and if it will grow after it being damaged by the geese.
Now if you go on to the next slide. This is just my final slide and I thought I’d just say thank you for taking the time to listen to me and I’m happy to take any questions but I’ll pass you back to Matt and Eilidh and Liz who should be able to field any questions.
Liz Peel [1:14:06 – 1:15:15]
Thank you, Laura and Matt and Donna, that was great. There are no questions in the chat. I don’t know if anyone has any questions for our speakers? I can’t actually see everyone, because we have a lot of people on, but I can scan through. If you want to stick your hand up if you’ve got a question, you do that by down at the bottom there should be a little… Sorry I haven’t used Zoom for a very long time. How do you put your hand up? Or you can put something in the chat where it says chat. You click on that it should bring the chat function up.
Okay, so we’ve got a question here. What is the ongoing maintenance needed for the two-year bumblebird mix if it’s being grown as a more long-term crop and not used in rotation?
Matt Willmott [1:15:15 – 1:17:14]
Okay, I’ll come in first and Laura and Donna, come in as well. So, I think I said, so the two-year crop which we’re growing, this bumblebird crop, is just a two-year crop. It’s composed of seed-bearing species, so some of the cereals, the kale as well as things like agricultural red clover. That’s a short-lived red clover, that’s different to the wild red clover. It’s agricultural red clover. It’s designed as a stock feed really or a grass or enhanced grass enhancement. So it will only last two years. So if you’re sowing that short term mix, it will only last two years and then it will need re-establishing.
During those two years, you don’t have to do anything with it at all. You just literally sow it. Hopefully it’ll grow well, let it do its thing for two years. From that perspective, it’s actually quite encouraging and quite a thing that crofters want to do.
If you wanted a longer term mix, that’s the perennial grass. That’s more of the wildflower meadow-type mix. That’s a different suite of species. That needs to be sewn with perennial species. Those that grow already in the area you are, ideally. So it will be a seed mix. It would be a wildflower seed mix. You might see, I was watching the news recently where I think it was Edinburgh were saying how much they’re doing for wildlife and they’re sowing all these wildflower mixes and all the while, the flower mixes they’re sowing are annual flower mixes, they’re all corn buttercup and oxeye daisy and poppy. Well, that’s all very well, but they’re not going to last very long because they’re annual species.
So it’s very much a case of thinking of them as two different habitat types. You’ve got a short-term pollen and nectar, or bumblebird mix, and then you’ve got a longer term perennial wildflower mix. The two are very different.
Liz Peel [1:17:14 – 1:17:36]
Thank you, Matt. There’s a question about the phacelia. After it flowers, it produces a lot of seed, but are the phacelia seeds of no interest to the twites and other seed-eating birds? Do they eat it or is it just self-seeding?
Matt Willmott [1:17:36 – 1:18:34]
Yeah, so it doesn’t seem to produce, so it will come back, I think it spreads underground, but it will produce some seed as well, but the seed which it produces isn’t palatable to bird species. So you never see bird species feeding on it. What you’re looking for really is the species like the kale or the mustard, the fodder radish, the linseed, the seed that ripens, it flowers and then ripens in a hard case, which is accessible to the birds through the winter months. Phacelia doesn’t do that but I would always encourage phacelia to be used for its pollen and nectar value, it’s a really good one and it’s a really nice visual one. If crofters or farmers perhaps who haven’t grown these mixes before and you want some color in the first few months following sowing, phacelia is a really important one, so I’d always encourage it, but it doesn’t necessarily deliver the seed For the birds in the winter.
Liz Peel [1:18:34 – 1:18:47]
Okay. Question from Rachel here. Is there a way of preparing and sowing a parcel of land with one of these mixes if you don’t have access to any machinery?
Matt Willmott [1:18:47 – 1:18:51]
Do you want to answer that Donna?
Donna Smith [1:18:51 – 1:19:56]
I mean, you could do the no-dig method that I spoke about that I would like to try, which we could have done if we didn’t have any machinery. You would need to make sure you covered the ground, probably the winter before, either with plastic or with cardboard and then have some sort of organic material that you could put on top. So that would be the way you could do it or you could hand dig it. Again, it depends on the size of the piece of ground that you have, but yeah certainly possible.
So really what you’re wanting to do is just prepare it the same way as you would be if you were going to plant vegetables. I think that what you recommended [Matt] was that you could prepare it in such a way so that you could cycle over it with a bicycle. So you want it quite smooth so that the seeds don’t get lost or they don’t go in between the cracks and things like that, so yes certainly possible.
Liz Peel [1:19:56 – 1:20:40]
I suppose it depends how much of an area you’ve got as well, it could be a bit of a job.
There’s a question about the grazing option. I was wondering how the grazed option will work? Are most of the species things that aren’t typically found on Shetland? And are there any other species you plan to experiment with. So three things there: How does the grazing bit work? Are most of them – the species – not found on Shetland? And have you got any other new species you’re going to experiment with?
Matt Willmott [1:20:40 – 1:23:23]
Yeah, so the first question is around the grazing, so as I said in my presentation, we’re still developing an exact mix from that and we aim to get crofters together in the coming weeks, probably at the event in March, maybe after that or subsequently, to come up with a mix which works for them as well as delivers. So the idea came from a crofter on Unst who’s done a lot of these sort of mixes before under agri-environment. But he suggested, and we might get more people interested if we have this kind of grazable mix so that would include putting in things like fodder rape or turnips or things like that. So it would still have a lot of the beneficial species in that I went through, but you’d have crops that are more designed to be eaten off and more nutritious for the sheep as well.
The idea is that crop would still be established in spring, it will be allowed to do its thing and germinate and grow through to, say, November, and then depending on what we agree with the crofters, they would then be able to use it for grazing. So it might be strip grazed. by sheep or by a number of sheep and the electric fence moved periodically, or it might be opened out to sheep on a low level. Now, we know that that’s not going to deliver the huge amount of winter seed that just a wildlife crop like Laura’s or Donna’s did, we understand that, but what it will do is give, certainly it will give bird species somewhere to forage. It’ll give that bare ground. It’s important, one thing we probably haven’t covered in this is these crops are not just important for producing seed, they’re really important as cover and they are alive with insects, even when the flowers have died off, there’s still a lot of invertebrates within the canopy and you get a lot of insect-feeding species foraging within the crop, so things like song thrush, hedge sparrow or dunnock, wrens, a lot of the migratory warblers, they’ll all use these crops for foraging.
So we know with this kind of grazable option, we’re not going to get that huge great winter seed delivery, but we are going to get some delivery and that will be reflected in the payments that we can then give to the farmers under Species on the Edge.
That was the first question. What was the second?
Liz Peel [1:23:23 – 1:23:36]
Are most of the species sown things that wouldn’t typically be found on Shetland? So native or endemic to Shetland, I suppose, yeah.
Matt Willmott [1:23:36– 1:25:10]
So that’s a question I’ve been asked before about introducing non-native invasives. Well, for a start, these species that we’re asking crofters to sow aren’t invasive. I mean crops have been grown in Shetland for centuries. I think there’s seeds from some kale that were found in kind of Neolithic settlements down the south of Shetland. So crops have been grown for many, many years here. These species, as Laura said, they won’t invade to adjacent pastures. They’re agricultural cultivars. They’re designed as crops to be grown in a certain area. So you won’t suddenly find kind of red clover and fodder radish growing all over the holding. It’s not designed like that. It’s a species which is grown in a cropped area. If, I said in my presentation, if we were going down the route of creating a longer term hay meadow type mix that’s where we’d be looking to use native seed from the islands because we know it’s species that will grow here. So that’ll be things like knapweed, salad burnet, those sorts of species, a lot of the mixes you get in this sort of maritime grassland that is still found in parts of Shetland and some of the wet grasslands, some of the wet meadows, we will be taking seed from those and using that seed, but that would be for the longer creation. So this kind of cropped habitat is seen as very different from a longer term perennial wildflower mix.
Liz Peel [1:25:10 – 1:25:27]
I’ve got a question here about the recording and monitoring for the pollinators. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing with that and how that’s been, I presume that’s something that Harry, and how he’s been doing it?
Matt Willmott [1:25:27 – 1:25:28]
Is Harry on the call is he?
Liz Peel [1:25:29 – 1:25:35]
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Harry Britton [1:25:35 – 1:25:59]
I don’t think we did a specific bee count this year, but that’s something we’re going to be looking to do further forwards. At the moment, I have just been going and identifying what has been there. Like on Laura’s alone, we’ve had four different bee species, but at the moment, there isn’t a set survey method that we are following for the bees, but that’s something that we are going to implement for the crops moving forward. Yeah.
Liz Peel [1:25:59 – 1:26:31]
Well, we’re nearly at our eight o’clock deadline. We could probably fit a last question in if anyone’s got one or if not, I will probably call it a day for this evening. I want to thank you all for joining us. Oh, hang on we’ve got a quick question here.
After the first season of a wildflower meadow, what mowing cycle have you found most beneficial for birds?
Matt Willmott [1:26:33 – 1:28:55]
So I think, so for a wildflower meadow the most important thing, if you’re establishing it from scratch, so you’re putting seed in and then and so you’re trying to establish a wildflower meadow, I’ll come back to that slide which said mow, mow, mow some more. It’s worth sacrificing the habitat quality in the first year to get it right, to get it growing properly as a meadow. If you just let it go, you’ll find that it can often, especially if there’s residual nitrogen particularly, but residual nutrients in the soil, you’ll get grass dominating very, very quickly. So all that expensive wildflower seed that you’ve got and put in won’t grow. So, a really important thing in that first year following establishment is to mow and it won’t feel very comfortable because you might even see some of the flowers coming through, but mow and mow again. And what you do is kind of encourage that tillering and you will encourage, you’ll still allow light to get to the soil and you allow some of those less vigorous species, i.e. the wildflowers, to get a foothold. So that mowing regime in year one is really important. You’ll never kill a perennial by mowing.
Then when it’s established, so after year one, I’d recommend you could either, some people mow one half of it, so that will create a different habitat structure, so you might mow one half in the spring, leave the other half and then mow it all in September or after July sort of time into September, August/September and that will create a sort of varied structure. So you’ll be mowing in a sort of variable structure. But the critical thing is the mowing, the regular mowing in year one, and then thereafter it’s important to kind of cut it at least late on and remove those cuttings where possible. If you’ve got access to livestock, brilliant, let them in after the hay cut and aftermath graze it, particularly cattle, but if you haven’t got access to stock, you might even be looking at cutting the whole field again in the spring. It feels slightly counterintuitive because you might have a lot of flowers there, but you’re never going to kill a perennial by mowing. So to make sure you get that management right in year one is the crucial bit.
Liz Peel [1:28:55 – end]
Great. Thanks, Matt. Well, that is eight o’clock now so I think we will call it a night. Thank you all for joining us this evening. Hope you enjoyed the talk. We are hoping to send around a little evaluation form and it would be really great if you could help us with our planning for future events in the autumn, just to give us a little bit of feedback. Our next talk will be about the small blue butterfly and that will be on the 12th of February at the same time. So I hope to see one or two of you come along to that. That would be great. Thank you, everybody, and have a lovely evening.
