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Game cover crops
Game cover crops significantly boost farmland biodiversity by providing shelter, breeding habitats, and food sources for a variety of wildlife including gamebirds, songbirds, small mammals and insects.
Around 25,000 hectares of game cover crops are planted in the UK every year on land managed for shooting, usually as linear habitats of up to 10m width on field margins, particularly in areas where pheasant and partridge are released.
Explore our case studies and guidance on creating and managing game cover crops.
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Profiling best practice
Making game cover crops count on a shoot in Derbyshire
The Monkwood Shoot had limited options for game cover crops and has provided 20 acres, mostly funded by club members.
Boosting biodiversity with game cover crops in the South Downs
Central to the success of the Peppering Biodiversity Project has been the creation of a 30-mile network of ‘nature highways’ via hedgerows, flower margins, winter cover strips and conservation headlands.
What does good look like?
How do I do that?
Game cover crops adjacent to field margins and hedgerows provide some of the biggest gains for game and wildlife. Read the advice.
What can I collect?
Most shoots will keep a mapped record of where and when game cover crops were planted for future reference, but few record the wildlife species that were found in them. Â
Having actual data on the wildlife that is benefitting is not only interesting for the shoot and but it transforms the way you can communicate that value to others and could help with applications to new agri-environmental schemes and other grants such as Defra’s new wildlife rich habitat fund.
Birds, butterflies and invertebrates are key groups that benefit from game cover crops and you don’t need much resource other than time to collect high quality data. Read our advice.
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Grey partridge recovery
What does a wild grey partridge shoot look like, and what are they doing that lets the birds, and everything else, thrive?
