I have now been working on my PhD, funded by Wild Oxfordshire, for three years as well as managing the Yellow Wagtail Partnership. My second home is the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at the University of Reading. I also went part-time this January to take on the Facilitator role for the Clumps Farmer Cluster and the Ridgeway Farmer Cluster but those are a topic for another blog.

The flagship species for the partnership, the Yellow Wagtail, has been the research focus for my PhD. The Yellow Wagtail is important for several other reasons as well as being the poster boy for the project. This bird was once widespread throughout England and Wales, and it was common to see flocks of 400 birds in the late 1920’s. However, today much of the population has contracted to the East and Southeast of England. Since 1970, we have seen Yellow Wagtail population declines of 70% in farmland habitats and 97% in wetland habitats. These declines have led to the bird being put on the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern. The subspecies that visits us each summer (Motacilla flava flavissima) is also virtually endemic to the UK in terms of its breeding range, meaning that the way we manage their breeding and foraging habitats will have a huge impact on the success of the subspecies.

As the Yellow Wagtail is traditionally associated with riparian grasslands, I planned to research their breeding and foraging ecology in this habitat by comparing grasslands that supported breeding Yellow Wagtails to those that did not. The findings would inform the management of the meadows and pastures in the Yellow Wagtail Partnership site and help us create suitable habitats therefore increasing the number of breeding pairs in the area.

I started the PhD like any other fresh-faced graduate, believing that all I needed to do was run around some fields, collect some data and do some maths to create some groundbreaking research. I would be rewarded with the title of Dr!

I soon learned I was wrong and like all research, my project did not go entirely to plan. The first hurdle was to find a good number of grassland sites that supported breeding Yellow Wagtails. After weeks of searching, speaking to experts and sending many emails, I had a total of zero study sites. Not ideal when you are given the brief to “find as many as breeding sites as you possibly can”. I guess I still met that brief…

It turns out that Yellow Wagtails have been increasingly avoiding grassland areas in favour for arable fields over the previous 30 years and they particularly avoid intensively managed grassland. My search for study sites certainly showed this. With the help from colleagues, farm ecologists and farmer cluster facilitators, I did manage to find farms that supported Yellow Wagtails in their arable systems. Even better, one of these farms own the arable land that surrounds the Yellow Wagtail Partnership area.

For the past two summers, I have been surveying these farms from when the birds first arrive in April/May to when they prepare to migrate back to West Africa in September. This has allowed me to monitor shifts in habitat preference throughout the breeding season. The surveys will also allow me to understand how habitat and crop diversity as well as land management practices influence Yellow Wagtail habitat selection.

Although I do not have any results yet, anecdotal evidence from my fieldwork suggests that Yellow Wagtails will nest in a variety of crops including wheat, barley, oats, beans and peas. They tend to like large open spaces with limited tree cover and the presence of water sources such as troughs, puddles and dew ponds is important. Towards the end of the breeding season, the birds will move to areas with cattle, and it is not uncommon to see flocks of Yellow Wagtails following the livestock. The latter observation highlights the importance of mixed farming systems, where crops and livestock are present on the same farm, for birds like the Yellow Wagtail.

I have also been working with some super enthusiastic bird ringers to collect Yellow Wagtail faeces. I am extracting the DNA from these to identify what the birds eat and how diets change over the breeding season. In conjunction, I am collecting insect samples from surrounding areas and will compare these to the species found in the faecal samples to identify important foraging habitats.

Although the PhD project has not gone entirely to plan, I believe the findings will still be beneficial to the Yellow Wagtail Partnership. Wild Oxfordshire has a growing number of projects that work with farmland and farmers. I hope my research will feed into these as well, supporting Yellow Wagtail populations not just within the partnership area but across the whole of Oxfordshire and beyond.

The ambitions of that fresh-faced graduate have not left me just yet.

The Yellow Wagtail Partnership is a landscape scale grassland restoration project hosted by Wild Oxfordshire. We are proud to be working with our partners, Earth Trust, Lower Farm Partnership and Church Farm Partnership to deliver the project. Using evidence-based approaches to land management is key to the project and we are keen to work with other research projects wherever possible, including university dissertations. Please get in touch if you have a possible research project in mind and would like to collaborate with the Yellow Wagtail Partnership.  For more information, please contact Project officer, Sophie Cunnington, sophie@wildoxfordshire.org.uk

*BOPSCAN website