Bog Myrtle & Peat

In the aftermath of a failed spring, a final lapwing’s nest appeared in the reworked field. I found the eggs and I asked the farmer if he’d allow me to mark the location with a traffic cone so that he could stay away from it. He had no interest in the birds, but he couldn’t see the harm in letting me try. So for the next ten days, he worked around the nest and the birds appeared to grow on him. The camera I set to monitor the nest captured photographs of him walking out to check on the eggs, and soon he was texting me for daily updates.

To his credit, it must be said that his work went much further than normal field operations usually go. He was overhauling an ex-military brownfield site into productive commercial grassland, and there were some days when three twenty five tonne diggers worked together in the same few acres, often within a few yards of the nest. The atmosphere was one of major upheaval, and the lapwings were an obvious inconvenience to the project. But as his interest grew, the farmer’s patience expanded to accommodate the birds. He not only protected the nest, but he also took exhaustive measures to avoid excessive disturbance. You could say that he became slightly obsessed, and I loved his enthusiasm.

For me, our collaboration had begun to feel like a good news story rescued from a disastrous year of failure and collapse in the local population of wading birds. If this one farmer could be excited and switched-on to conservation, I was inspired to imagine how his interest could grow and encourage others to do likewise. It was only a small victory, but it felt worthwhile.

In this light, I was excited to post this story on social media. The tweet itself is above; it reached a few thousand viewers and attracted a considerable swell of positive feedback. That was encouraging, but there were some notable exceptions to this support – and it’s fair to say that nothing can survive for long on Twitter without being attacked. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it’s attracting attention, some of it’s going to be negative, and often from angles that could never have been foreseen.

Several comments actively berated the farmer for his ignorance, screaming abuse at the very idea of a man who didn’t know what a lapwing was. These comments mainly came from conservation-minded people who seem to harbour an intractable hatred of farmers. I have to say that this kind of negativity was in a minority, but it played as a worrying backdrop to wider discussions about conservation and land use. I spend so much of my time getting farmers engaged in conservation projects, I sometimes forget that it’s pretty innovative stuff. For many people, farmers are the enemy – full stop. For them, “fighting for nature” means “fighting against farmers”. 

Away from social media, the nest progressed to hatching. I took some nice photographs of the chicks on my nest camera, then I followed them down to a wet patch in the field nearby. Everything was going well, and the farmer was thrilled with the photographs I sent him. He wanted to come out and visit “his chicks” on their first day in this world, and he brought his family along with a surge of pride and excitement. But before he could get there, the entire brood was wiped out. It’s always hard to be certain of a “cause of death” for young waders, but I feel pretty sure they were taken by red kites. Three kites were being mobbed over the field all afternoon, and while I couldn’t follow the action in detail, it seems the most likely explanation.

So the outcome was another point of deflation and disappointment, particularly after all the work and care which was poured into protecting the eggs. The farmer did everything he possibly could, and I’m not sure how this failure will land with him. The reality is that he had nine lapwing nests on his land this year – every single nest failed and not a single chick was fledged. I was trying to help this farmer feel like he could be part of the answer and I loved the journey we went on together. We both did our absolute best, but the result is that were got kicked in the teeth anyway. I know that I’ll try again next year, but it’s difficult to tell if he will. Farmers like a challenge, but they also like to feel like the objective is actually possible. I wouldn’t blame him for focussing his attention elsewhere in 2025.

When we look at schemes to support wader conservation, it’s hard to understand how we can support farmers to do the right thing for birds like lapwings and curlews. We can pay them to do general activities which correlate towards a shakily defined sense of what’s “good”. We can encourage them to work together and fund clusters to collaborate and innovate, and we can agitate for NGOs to support and facilitate these groups – but none of these things guarantee success. Besides, nobody really checks they’re working anyway. Many farmers are just going through the motions, and I have been working on the assumption that the missing ingredient is often passion – enthusiasm and a determination to turn things around. Passion certainly helps, and some of the best wader conservation projects in the UK are powered by love and bloody-mindedness. Where subsidies and schemes are involved at all, public money is simply used to cover the cost of work that would have been done anyway by individuals who are mad and passionate enough to take a punt. But even from first principles, paying farmers to conserve waders doesn’t work. They have to want to do it (to which I’d add: they have to REALLY want to do it) and it turns out that in the case of this final lapwing’s nest, even a tidal wave of love and determination is sometimes not enough either. 

There’s plenty for me to learn from a disastrous year for wading birds in Galloway, but there’s no clear road ahead for this kind of conservation. You could say that it wouldn’t be interesting if it was easy – but you could also argue that it would be useful to experience some success for a change.