Country Diary: Tetbury

I was delighted to learn, from a recently delivered regional news update for the West Country from the RSPB, that its work to safeguard the future of the UK's rarest farmland bird has turned a corner: it announced the first breeding of cirl buntings outside Devon for more than 15 years. A breeding pair were sighted in a Cornish garden this summer - clearly related to the 700 pairs recorded further east. I learned, moreover, that the cirl bunting reintroduction project is now partly funded by Defra's Countdown 2010 Biodiversity Action Fund.

If you can lay your hands on a bird book of 1930 or thereabouts you will find that the cirl bunting, a small bird not unlike the yellowhammer, was then described as a common farmland bird, especially in southern parts of these islands. The population collapse over the bulk of the country was down to new agricultural practices that left little food on the ground in arable areas; and I imagine the cirl bunting was not the only victim of the loss of a food source that had supported farm and hedgerow birds for centuries.

A surviving population of cirl buntings was identified on the south Devon coastal strip in the 1980s, and I recall meeting RSPB staff who were able to describe the work going on even then to persuade farmers to pursue practices that left a bit of nourishment about for small birds. It has clearly worked: 120 breeding pairs in the 1980s have become the 700 pairs of more recent years. I met the RSPB's cirl bunting officer on that occasion, a serious young woman who told me that she had previously been the corncrake officer in the Hebrides. In conservation terms both jobs have worked, for the cirl bunting population is evidently reviving and I believe that the corncrake population continues to visit the Western Isles.