 The miscanthus crop offers a different ecological niche for each season—the authors attribute this to the continually evolving structural heterogeneity of a miscanthus crop, with different species finding shelter at different times during its development—woodland birds found shelter in the winter and farmland birds in the summer.For birds, 0.92 breeding pairs species per hectare (0.37 per acre) was found in the miscanthus field, compared to 0.28 (0.11) in the wheat field.The authors note that due to the high carbon to nitrogen ratio, it is in the field's margins and interspersed woodlands that the majority of the food resources are to be found.