Thanks to the generous support of our private partners: Yocha Dehe Community Fund, Banrock Station and Banrock Station Trust, and PG&E, Audubon California -- in partnership with NRCS, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, UC Cooperative Extension, UC Davis and UC Berkeley -- has learned that farm edges with hedgerows support four times the number of bird species that unplanted farm edges do. Learn more about this study in the Davis Enterprise:
In a drought, the only thing stopping the eye from seeing endless beige in parts of Yolo County are 10-foot-wide strips of mini-forests on the edges of the area’s fields.
These darker lines in the distance are the hedgerows. Indigenous bushes, shrubs and small trees like toyon, coffeeberry, coyote brush, valley oak, cottonwood, willow, mule fat, buckwheat and elderberry can be found here, and they’re used by Audubon California to study bird species diversity and populations.
