We are lucky enough to have turtle doves visiting our Crundale fields The turtle dove is now the UK’s most threatened breeding bird. Its population has fallen by 94% in the UK since 1995.
In 2020 we started scattering a seed mix weekly for 8-10 weeks starting in May as a supplementary feed for turtle doves. This helps them out early on in the year when there may not be enough wild flower seeds to forage for.
This has been aranged by Nicole Khan, RSPB Turtle Dove Conservation Officer and in 2021 Nicole installed a wildlife camera in the area where the supplementary feeding was carried out and Theresa has looked through the thousands of images and put together this lovely montage of pictures and text to tell the story of who's eating the seed and/or visiting the field.
We dug a couple of small ponds at the bottom of the fields at our Crundale site in the winter of 2020/21, mainly to provide water for wildlife, including the turtle doves, to drink during a hot summer. We have a wildlife camera sited at one of the ponds most of the time, and have captured some great photos over the years, which can be seen our our facebook page as well as some on our earlier blog posts.
facebook.com/ripplefarmorganics
The full list of birds pictured so far is blackbird, blue tit, buzzard, crow, chaffinch, dunnock, goldfinch, great tit, great spotted woodpecker, green woodpecker, greenfinch, grey partridge, grey wagtail, heron, house sparrow, jackdaw, jay, kestrel, linnet, little owl, magpie, pheasant, red-legged partridge, redwing, robin, rook, song thrush, sparrowhawk, stock dove, tawny owl, turtle dove, woodcock, woodpigeon, wren, yellowhammer.
And the following mammals have been pictured too, red fox, badger, rabbit, polecat/ferret hybrid, stoat, hedgehog, squirrel, field mouse, rat.
From the fields we rent at Wye, formerly part of the Wye Agricultural College Farm, we have some fab wildlife photos taken in 2019 by a local photographer, Richard Earland. These are now on a page on his website, our favourites so far are the ones of the 4 kestrels fledging.
https://richardearland.co.uk/ripple-farm
Also, in the Wye fields, we were very excited in February 2024 to find a harvest mouse nest in the dried long grass in between the rows of a 2 year old hedge we planted. The nest would have been used for breeding between May and October last year. Harvest mice are Britain’s smallest rodent, weighing just 4-6 grams, and mostly active at dawn and dusk so very hard to spot. Finding a nest is the easiest way to know that they are present in our fields. More info on harvest mice here https://kent.wildwoodtrust.org/explore/list-of-animals/harvest-mouse/