Birds, Scythes and Combines
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Birds, Scythes and Combines provides a historical perspective to changes in farmland bird populations in Britain over the past 250 years. Despite the scale of change in habitats and agricultural methods in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to enclosure and the spread of high farming, early avifaunas show that farmland birds were little affected. Specialised species of fen and marsh were lost, often as much due to persecution as to habitat destruction, but farmland birds benefited from the app