The curlews are back in the dale. Think everyone loves to hear and see them.
I found this article from the Times Online very interesting.
Controlling predators can save the curlew
It’s unfashionable, but shooting a fox or catching a stoat is good for wading birds
Their success has been measured by rising numbers of grouse, which are now an important industry in the shooting season. But the by-product has been a marked increase in the numbers of curlew, lapwing and even the once-rare golden plover.
Lest this is dismissed as merely “anecdotal” evidence, a remarkable nine-year survey has just been completed at Otterburn in Northumberland, where the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust tested out the theory that predators were the principal threat to wading birds. They took two main areas of moorland — one where predators were controlled, one where they were not. The results, published last week, were astounding: waders were more than three times likely to raise their chicks in the areas where trapping took place than in those which remained wild. When, in some years, controls were lifted, numbers dropped.
It is probably one of the most important pieces of moorland research carried out in recent years, and it raises an intriguing point: why has so little attention been paid to it by conservation bodies, such as Natural England, Scottish Natural Heritage or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? Surely they should be embracing the Otterburn conclusions and seeing whether they might be applied elsewhere?
There is, of course, a catch. For these organisations to applaud the Game Conservancy’s findings would mean supporting the shooting lobby, backing landowners, coming out in favour of grouse moors. Not only is that a cultural leap too far, it would mean sitting down with the enemy. These, after all, are the people who are regularly accused of persecuting eagles, falcons and hen harriers. Only this month there were headlines again about the numbers of birds of prey found shot or poisoned in Scotland.
That most of these deaths involved buzzards, which have enjoyed a population explosion in recent years, and which regularly feed on the offspring of moorland birds, is considered less important than the occasional killing of a sea eagle or a red kite — species that have been introduced recently and are multiplying fast.
And so there is a stand-off between two sides in the conservation debate. One argues that those who own and farm the land are simply interested in propagating birds for shooting. The other claims that the conservation bodies favour only birds of prey, at the expense of anything else. Between them are acres of common ground — but no one seems able to occupy it. Apart, that is, from our beloved, vanishing, curlew.
