One morning last month I walked to the top of the hill (known fondly as ‘the mountain’) on the eastern side of Bardsey Island. I had a fine view of the irregular patchwork of small fields, which stitch together like quilting across the lowland part of the island. Rumpled with rushes and rough grasses the soft green and brown was lit by small ponds glinting in the morning sun. I imagine this is what pastoral landscapes must have looked like seventy years ago before agriculture modernised and intensified. And remarkably this place is getting more tousled and grubby-kneed as each year passes. To some this might look like neglect but in truth it is the result of very careful husbandry.

Bardsey means different things to different people: holiday destination, bird observatory, place of pilgrimage, farm, and nature reserve – even ‘home’ to a few. But it was the intersection of farming and conservation that particularly interested me that morning. Anyone visiting the island would be in no doubt this is a farm: the impressive farmsteads, field boundaries and scattered livestock make that obvious – and add a bucolic charm for many. This is a long settled place; it has been worked for centuries. A fundamental truth about the British countryside is that it has been farmed for so long that much of its wildlife adapted by default to the slow moving, hand-made agriculture that was commonplace until the Second World War. Most wildlife was simply an unintended by-product of farming operations. Deliberately managing a farm and a nature reserve for the benefit of both is another matter – especially on an island. Nature conservation rightly takes prides in its scientific base but day-to-day farming, particularly the management of livestock, is a pragmatic business – the art of ‘suck it and see’. It is not often that the science directly informs the art.

Nearly eleven years ago Gareth Roberts, who is the farming tenant on Bardsey as well as Cwrt farm on the mainland, employed Steve Porter to run the day-to-day operation for him on the island. Steve didn’t come from a traditional farming background so he arrived with an open mind.  His wife Jo, who is an ecologist, was also employed by the RSPB to monitor changes in the island’s wildlife, and so inform the farming. You couldn’t have written it: when conservation and agriculture are so often in conflict, on Bardsey the farmer and ecologist were comparing notes over breakfast; fine tuning the day to day, year to year management of the land for the benefit of both livestock and nature. Thanks to Gareth’s open handed and innovative guidance and the increasing flexibility and trust of Natural Resources Wales (the government conservation agency) Steve and Jo have been able to experiment: adjusting and re-adjusting the farm management, particularly the grazing of sheep and cattle for the benefit of wildlife. What has resulted is that rarity – a conservation good news story.

When Steve and Jo first came to Bardsey they inherited wide acres of closely grazed sheep pasture with little biodiversity and a very prescriptive and inflexible grazing plan. Working with Gareth and NRW their aim has been to manipulate the livestock grazing to gradually produce mosaics of vegetation, which they hoped, would naturally increase the diversity of plants and animals. Eleven years on the heather and creeping willow are now thriving on the precious maritime heath and orchids and insects are increasingly abundant in the pastureland. That morning I had seen hundreds of autumn lady’s tresses orchids in the fields – tiny twisting spires, miniature cathedrals that could have been designed by Gaudi. The choughs so often said to require nothing but tightly cropped turf for feeding are now also probing the heathland and rough grassland for invertebrate prey. Cattle, recently introduced to the mountain in summer, are making inroads into the bracken, which can smother more delicate plants. Grasshoppers, bees and spiders are taking advantage of the increase in flowers and longer grasses. Year-by-year this farm has been getting better for wildlife. That is a sentence to savour.

Adjusting livestock grazing to benefit wildlife is tricky, if the ground is wet heavy-footed cattle may damage the vegetation, if it is dry they may not have enough to drink. If you need to take sheep off to allow plants to flower it may be a problem where to put them, especially if other areas are stocked to conservation capacity. Steve and Jo have also learned that seasonality is an important part of the ‘where, when and how many animals’ calculation. Each year’s pattern is, in part, a response to the weather of the previous year; a flush of grass after a wet warm season will smother less competitive flowers if the grazing isn’t increased in response. Flexibility is essential.  Sheep graze in a quite different way to cattle, clipping rather than tearing the vegetation, each producing a different kind of sward as a result. Of course much of this is true for every livestock farm but here the goal is a thriving ecosystem as well as healthy livestock.

This has been a golden time for conservation farming on Bardsey, but sadly things are changing as Steve and Jo are leaving. Having successfully reared and home-schooled their two children, Ben and Rachel, through to higher education they feel the time has come to move back to the mainland. Fortunately Gareth and his wife Meriel are able to move to the island in their stead, so the farming will remain in good hands, and Jo will continue to come back and do some wildlife monitoring.  That evening, as the sun was going down, nearly everyone on the island gathered on the beach to say goodbye to Steve and Jo. Food and drink round a driftwood fire and an energetic football match provided a typical island send off. Sitting there looking out over the sea into the sun setting behind the Irish hills I had mixed feelings, but it was gratifying to be able to reflect on the work of some good people who had made a difference, and two in particular for whom the work had been a calling as much as a job.

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