Habitat Creation for Wildlife

Aim

Speyside Fields for Wildlife work with farmers, landholders, gardeners, community groups, to create or enhance their sites for wildlife.

Speyside Fields for Wildlife was set up in 2017 by a group of wildlife enthusiasts and is an entirely voluntary led charity. 

Helping farmland birds survive the winter.

                    We help farmers grow crops for winter bird feeding. Flocks of up to 1000 finches are regularly recorded feeding on our winter crops. We now have 40 species of birds and 13 species of butterfly recorded on our fields.

 We add cornfield annuals to the fields for summer nectar and pollen. These pretty weeds were once found in farmers fields but are scarce now.

Perennial Wildflower Meadows      We are working with several landholders who have either a small acreage or who can set aside  part of a larger farm to create perennial flower meadows. These can be in a farmland setting, community owned land or private gardens. We support the owners with land preparation, seed and on going management.

Habitat creation or improvement can range from creating annual or perennial meadows, wild bird winter feeding, planting hedges or advice on which trees to plant or protect. Money is spent on anything which is needed such as seeds, paying contractors to prepare land, cutting and baling flower rich meadows, animal management, hedging, tree/hedge protection.  The list is long and the possibilities for habitat improvement endless.

A community project we are piloting is the improvement of a local verge. Volunteers cut and remove the cuttings, then sow yellow rattle seed. Even after the first year of management lots of wood anemones made a dazzling appearance on the verge. This community effort is supported by local residents giving their time and effort. The local community is gradually adding to the verge by growing plug plants from native wildflower seed.

We are increasingly experiencing enquiries for our help and advice  and more funds would enable us to support lots more projects. SFW works alongside other Conservation organisations such as Cairngorms National Park, RSPB and Plantlife.                                                                    Thank you for supporting our work.

This project successfully funded on 3rd November 2023