Cheshire Wildlife Trust’s conservation team have been busy creating new habitat at their Bickley Hall Farm headquarters with the aim of making parts of the farm more attractive to wading birds.

Machinery was drafted in to complete the task after a rotary ditching machine made its way up from Oxfordshire to Bickley to create the ‘scrapes’, essentially, shallow, sinuous channels in fields.

Over the course of three days the specialist-ditching machine was used to create nearly a kilometres of meandering three metre wide scrapes to attract curlews and lapwings.

“The design of the scrapes, is critical to the wildlife they will support,” said Ben Gregory, Area Manager South, part of the expert conservation team at Cheshire Wildlife Trust.

“With their flowing design and gentle sloping edges, we’re hoping they’ll provide the perfect feeding habitat for wading birds and our quest to increase the number of breeding waders such as lapwing, curlew and redshank at Bickley Hall Farm will be one step closer.

Back in 2016, they designed a scheme of works to enhance the wetland habitat to make it more wildlife-friendly.

The work included creating 2700m² of new linear scrapes and installing a series of adjustable sluices on some their ditches to control water levels.

“The idea is to retain water in the fields throughout winter and into spring,” added Ben. "This provides a food source for wading birds such as lapwing and snipe and farmland birds such as tree sparrow - all of which are regularly seen at Bickley.”

It was funded through the Natural England Countryside Stewardship scheme.