Corn Buntings

I spent most of today thinking about Corn Buntings, not actually looking at them, just thinking. I'm in the third year of my degree in Wildlife and Countryside Conservation, and my dissertation is concerned with the breeding habitat selection of Corn Buntings. I did all the fieldwork in East Yorkshire/North Lincolnshire from May to August 2006 and I'm finally getting a chance to write up my findings.

I surveyed in the region of 100 square kilometres near RSPB Blacktoft Sands and found 168 singing male Corn Buntings. I plotted their territories and recorded the crops that each was using, whilst mapping the land use of the entire area. Fortunately, the weather was really warm and sunny for most of the study period, so the task was very pleasant indeed.

The initial results show quite a preference for Winter Barley in the period from 15th May to 15th June, but this changed after this period. The Barley was harvested in the first few days of July and the implication is that most of the nests were destroyed by this. On the positive side, birds seemed to be making use of other crops after this, perhaps making another attempt to breed. Winter Wheat and Peas were both popular from mid June to mid July. The next stage is to work out a biodiversity value for each kilometre grid sqaure and to compare that with Corn Bunting territory density, to see if there is an association between crop diversity and Corn Bunting density.

I also recorded Corn Bunting song posts, although this will not be a part of my dissertation as I already have quite enough data with the crop selection records. I recorded what the males were using as song posts, and the results were quite interesting (See graph below).

The labels are a bit too small to read I can see:

The first tall column from the origin is for umbellifers; both Cow Parsley and Hogweed.

The second tall column, which reaches to about 50, is for trees and large bushes.

The last tall column is for overhead wires.

All the other columns are for various arable weeds and crops.

Most birdwatchers that have seen Corn Buntings will have noticed birds using wires and trees to call from, but the massive preference for umbellifers over other arable weeds has been of interest to most people I have spoken to, including Simon Tonkin of the RSPB, who has done lots of work on the species (See his post about some of his success with CBs here).

There will be plenty more about Corn Buntings here when I've done further work with my data, I'll have to get a move on, my dissertation has to be in by mid April; almost a year after doing the work!