The first year of the project examining the impacts of biomass crops on farmland birds has just come to an end, so I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for your involvement and for allowing me to conduct fieldwork on your land. Thanks to you and other growers of biomass crops in the area, I was able to study a variety of crop types and investigate various different ways in which these were used by birds.

Fieldwork in this first year fell into two categories: a survey of birdlife in and around the crops, with additional density surveys of skylark and lapwing; and faecal sampling from chicks of any nesting hedgerow species, in combination with invertebrate sampling of the field.

Your fields were used for the latter, and I enclose a list of the bird species found, together with details of any nests encountered. This dataset is currently being analysed, but it is hoped that this will enable me to gain an insight into how birds use biomass crops and how much invertebrate food is available and accessible to them within the crop. This information, and that gained from preliminary skylark and lapwing surveys will be built upon over the next two field seasons, across the same and additional sites.