This week we spent a day learning all about hedges – their importance and their history as well as how to plant, manage and rejuvenate them.

After the Second World War, farmers were incentivised to dig up hedgerows in order to maximise the area available for food production and a lot of our hedges were lost over the next few decades. These days, though, it is recognised quite how vital hedges are for all sorts of reasons and the Government has recently increased its funding for farmers to plant new hedges as well as to rejuvenate existing ones. In fact, it has set a target to help create 45,000 miles of new hedging to be planted in the UK by 2050.

A good hedge for wildlife will have a nice mix of tree species, it will be dense at the bottom with a good height and width and will have structural complexity. But, over time, the trees making up the hedge will grow upwards and will tend to lose density at the base, by which point it has lost much of its value to wildlife.

For centuries the hedges in this country were managed on a cycle – they were planted and left to grow for ten years and then they were laid. Hedge laying involves cutting partway through the stems about 5cm off the ground which stimulates new shoots right at the base. The stems are then bent over and secured with stakes and binders. They will still go on growing in their new diagonal position and there is now also new growth coming straight up from the low cuts.

The new growth that is generated at the base represents the new generation of the hedge and this will now grow strongly. If the hedge is trimmed every so often – each time leaving everything a little bit higher and wider than the last trim – it can then be forty years until it becomes necessary to lay the hedge again and begin the cycle once more.

But about sixty years ago, the hedge management cycle almost completely stopped in this country – hedges were no longer being laid but were only ever trimmed from then on. It is estimated that by now only 48% of the UK’s hedgerows are in good structural health. The rest are in need of rejuvenation but only a very few traditional hedge layers are still working.

The People’s Trust for Endangered Species has a Healthy Hedgerows App that helps to classify the state of an existing hedge using this scale:

It was really interesting to walk with Megan and assess the hedges that we came across on the farm. There was also evidence to be seen that some of the old hedges had been laid long ago:

We have come away from the day with a much greater appreciation and understanding of hedgerows. We don’t yet know what we are going to do about that overgrown cliff-line hedge – probably nothing actually – but what we are going to do straight away is prune the 85m of new hedgerow that was planted a few years ago. It has been badly affected by a couple of drought summers since planting and there has really not been much growth. But a prune now will encourage everything to be much bushier as we go forward.

John and John, the bird ringers, have managed to dodge the rain and the wind and get a ringing session in – both in the meadows and also in the wood:

John was up at Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory for a meeting this week and spotted this short-eared owl as he was leaving. Luckily he had his camera with him:

The trail cameras have been fairly quiet. The buzzard has continued to hunt from the top of the haypile:

I have cropped the next two photos by the same amount to show the large difference in size between a sparrowhawk on the left and the buzzard on the right:

I am seeing magpies perched up with sticks in their beaks although I still have not located this years nest:

There have been some nice fox photos:

My brother and sister-in-law came to stay for a few days this week and one day we walked south along the cliffs between the village of Kingsdown and the Port of Dover. The weather was mostly pretty awful but, even through the rain, they could appreciate what a lovely stretch of coastline it is:

This seven-mile stretch of coastline is mostly owned by the National Trust these days and they have been working hard to return it to the glorious wildlife-rich habitat it once was. If we had done this walk in the summer we may well have seen clouds of blue butterflies, various species of orchid, corn buntings, yellowhammer, choughs and peregrine falcons. But in the cold and rain of late February we saw none of these things and I am looking forward to doing this walk again on a lovely spring morning before too long.