Helping farmers help nature. Supporting biodiversity across England to enhance raptor populations. Makers of raptor nest boxes and nest boxes for Swifts.
We would love to receive any reports of White-letter Hairstreaks. They are a hard species to find but we feel they may be under recorded. Populations were badly effected by Dutch Elm disease as it feeds exclusively on that tree but some Elm does remain in hedgerows. 📷 Iain Leach
Spent a wonderful morning on the river Glaven, looking at the positive changes that beavers have made to the landscape within their secure enclosure. Such a worthwhile project by the @N_Rivers_Trust
A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years putting up barn owl nest boxes on weekends. This year, the region saw 308 owlets hatch.
His name is Robert Salter. He's 56 and does bricklaying full time. In 1990, he saw a piece on the news about a man in Lincolnshire installing barn owl boxes, and decided he'd do the same. He started with five.
He now has more than 350 boxes scattered across fields, farms, outbuildings, and trees in East Yorkshire. Every June, he takes four weeks off from bricklaying and visits them with his wife Sue. Scrambling up ladders, ringing chicks, cleaning boxes, repairing the ones the weather got to. He's a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology.
In 2024, the region ringed 95 owlets. In 2025, the count was 308. The Barn Owl Trust says that nationally, this year was "pretty poor" for barn owl breeding, but east Yorkshire is the exception, and it's the exception because of one man with a ladder.
The barn owl population in the UK was estimated at 4,000 pairs in the mid-2000s and crashed to roughly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The species is still recovering.
Most of conservation is one person who refuses to give up.
Bees hard at work in the garden this afternoon. I plant different types of Salvia in different areas of the garden as they become bee magnets. So lovely to watch them, and, despite the strong wind you can hear in the trees, the bees are sheltered in this patch.
Great news! The new Swift boxes in west Norfolk have residents!
This is @NigelMiddleto12 installing the box a couple of weeks ago. For more information go to https://t.co/QFngKAJxaT
In December, the Govt will decide if it will renew the glyphosate licence until 2041…
•That’s 15 more years of impacts on worms, bees, soils and run-off into ponds and rivers, and glyphosate in your food. Sign Garden Organic’s petition NOW to ban this dangerous herbicide.
For all my dear Twitter pals who are stuck indoors today, come and stand with me this morning and listen to the dawn chorus. The Tawny Owl and the Cuckoo is calling in this, the loudest month for the chorus. Migratory birds join the residents to establish territory.