This was first published in the Summer 2019 edition of BTO News, the excellent membership magazine of the British Trust for Ornithology. The article describes BTO's collaborative wader projects.
On a crisp spring morning in Glen Ey, a glacial valley which sweeps up towards the Cairngorm plateau, a gamekeeper is staking out a Crow’s nest on an old, lone, gnarly Scots Pine. While he waits, a female Curlew feeding in the tussocky grasses below catches his eye. After watching her for a while, he sees her sink slowly down, and knows he is in luck. He quickly locates the nest, takes a GPS reading and sets up a nest camera. Then, he carefully moves the four eggs and pushes a thermal data-logger below the nesting material. He replaces the eggs and retreats to watch the bird return to the nest.
The decline of our breeding wader populations is a story oft repeated. Agricultural intensification has reduced the suitability of much farmland habitat. In many remaining lowland populations productivity has fallen far below sustainable levels, with predation on nests and chicks by generalists like Foxes, Badgers and Crows making population recovery unlikely. However, upland rough pastures on the moorland fringe still hold breeding waders, with higher densities and more productive populations in areas where predator control is carried out. Despite evidence for the importance of predator control in delivering sustainable wader populations, those working on the ground often feel this message isn’t acknowledged and communicated to the extent that it should be by conservation organisations. With support growing for native woodland regeneration, public debates around grouse moor management, and economic and societal pressures on livestock farming, the upland landscapes which currently support high densities of breeding waders could look quite different in future. To gain a better understanding of how land management and landscape structure influence our breeding wader populations, we need to
find common ground between estates with different objectives, and also between interest groups with conflicting views on how the uplands should be managed.
We are working with the Cairngorms National Park Authority and a partnership of six estates (Balmoral, Glenlivet, Glenavon, Invercauld, Mar and Mar Lodge) to better understand where breeding waders can be accommodated in the upland landscapes of the eastern Cairngorms. Specifically, we are interested in how woodland cover affects wader productivity at a landscape scale; a particularly relevant question in an area where there is support for expanding native woodland. There are lots of benefits of getting gamekeepers, rangers and estate staff involved. They often spend large parts of their working day in areas with breeding waders, and many have excellent ID skills and field-craft. We have trained staff on the six participating estates to monitor nests with cameras and data-loggers and to carry out breeding-wader transect surveys. In the first year, participants monitored over a hundred nests, and collected survey data from around 20 sites across farmland and moorland habitat.
The data shows that the effect of woodland in increasing predation pressure is ameliorated by predator control. There is lots of enthusiasm for monitoring waders out there – in the Yorkshire Dales, for example, where we first trialled this approach in collaboration with Bolton Castle Estate and the national park authority, a large group of estates is now carrying out systematic annual surveys on their breeding waders. To ensure their work and that of others is as valuable as possible, we want to build a wader data hub to facilitate the comparison and sharing of data across different projects, habitats and landscapes, and encourage the collection of long-term data sets which will give us a more informed picture of what works on the ground.
Back in the East Cairngorms later in the summer, the keeper returns to Glen Ey and retrieves the camera and data-logger from the now-empty Curlew nest. He takes a look at the footage later, and sees the welcome sight of four fluffy Curlew chicks tumbling out of the nest with a watchful parent nearby. Should we find a sustainable future for our upland breeding waders, it will be a story which involves a broad range of interest groups working together, united by a shared passion for the sights and sounds these fantastic birds bring to our upland landscapes. And while there are strong feelings and conflicting views on how our uplands should be managed, this should not lessen our determination to inform these debates with robust science.
This work was funded by the Cairngorms National Park Authority. We are grateful for the hard work of staff at participating estates and volunteers from the Tomintoul and Glenlivet Wildlife Group.
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