PRESS RELEASE

27 August 2009

The Amazing Ditch-cutting Machine

A groundbreaking machine has been in action at Cheshire Wildlife Trust’s HQ, Bickley Hall Farm nr Malpas, this weekend.
The remarkable ditch-cutting machine (as recently seen on Countryfile television programme) has been specially brought over from the USA by the RSPB to travel around the UK digging ditches for wildlife purposes (primarily to benefit birds).

In a prime example of forward planning and co-operation between conservation groups, organised by the RSPB, landowners around the country – including three sites in Cheshire – have signed up to benefit from a visit by the machine as it trundles past their patch.

Cheshire Wildlife Trust is currently in the process of establishing its first Living Landscape project and parallel to this the ‘rotary ditcher machine’ was commissioned to visit Bickley Hall Farm on Sunday 23rd August to dig 18 ditches totalling 1.8km in length.
The machine was invented for creating drainage ditches but its unique soil cutting and dispersal system has been seized upon by the wildlife fraternity, as cutting scrapes and ditches for wading birds has proved consistently difficult using other methods (see below).

Rare and endangered wading birds such as curlew, snipe and lapwing, require shallow water in open spaces with gently sloping margins for breeding purposes. Because most open land is cultivated for agricultural purposes, shallow wet and boggy patches of land have commonly been drained so these breeding habitats are rapidly disappearing and consequently so are the birds themselves.

Cheshire Wildlife Trust is working to reverse this trend by taking on wetland sites such as the Gowy Meadows (floodplain grazing marsh) and managing and restoring them with a Conservation Grazing Scheme that demonstrates farming can work in harmony with the natural habitat of the site rather than needing to adapt it.

Bickley Hall Farm, where the Trust is based, also has boggy land which has (historically) been partially drained through ditches which lead into Bar Mere. The ditches are now well established and host a variety of aquatic invertebrate life, but they are deep cuts that are not encouraging for wading birds, so 18 extra ditches – shallow scrapes – have been cut to hold water seasonally to provide breeding habitat for waders in the springtime.

Natural scrapes are more likely to be circular and provide a wider expanse of open water but the linear ditches will provide more edges (the main requirement for breeding) and are being grouped together to create a larger overall area for the birds.
Other means of cutting the scrapes would either be manual labour (hugely expensive and time consuming) or by using a digger. But because the scrapes need to be cut into naturally boggy ground – so that they will naturally fill with water – it is difficult to remove earth to other areas, because heavy wheelbarrows or machines sink into the ground.

Consequently, scrapes dug by these means comprise a hollow (the scrape) plus a bank at its edge (the earth scraped out). The problem with this is that when bird chicks hatch they cannot scramble over the bank – so parent birds will not nest on that type of habitat.

The new machine ‘scoops’ the earth out of the ground in a channel and then immediately scatters it over a large area so the edges of the scrape remain shallow and therefore ideal for the birds as a breeding ground.

The Trust will be monitoring the birds and other wildlife such as aquatic invertebrate that the scrapes attract with a view to rolling out the scheme to some of its nature reserves ¬– particularly the wetland sites in the Gowy and Mersey Washlands Living Landscape area – when the machine comes through Cheshire again next year.

-ENDS-