Bog Myrtle & Peat

The Working for Waders nest camera project continues across Scotland, and it’s worth a brief update on the nests I’m monitoring here in Galloway.

The golden plover are doing fine on the high tops, and I receive regular updates on their progress. It seems to be a general habit that the two birds share incubation equally. The beautifully black-breasted male bird arrives at the nest around half past eight every morning and releases the duller female from her vigil. She flies away and returns at around eight o’clock every evening. The changeovers are brisk, and the sitting bird leaps up and away as soon as it sees its partner approaching on foot. This nest was discovered on the 2nd May, so at most we should expect the eggs to hatch in the next nine days. Tension mounts, and I scan the camera’s online portal for updates every five minutes.

Down in the hayfields, I have a camera set up on an oystercatcher’s nest. I’m almost certain that these are the same two birds which lost their eggs to a badger last spring, and it’s hard to see how they can possibly avoid the same outcome this year. The soil around their nest is churned up with fresh diggings, and when I went to change batteries this morning, I found freshly turned sods less than six feet from the eggs. This is consistent with the idea that badgers are useless hunters. They raid nests when they find them, but otherwise they simply grope around in the dark. The issue is that we now have so many badgers working back and forth for extended periods across large areas that few eggs can escape this level of blundering for long.

I am in two minds about this nest. It would be easy for me to protect the eggs from being eaten with a small electric fence, but I think there’s value in letting the birds take their chance in the real world. There are still many badger enthusiasts who refuse to acknowledge that predation has any impact on groundnesting birds. If I can capture a nest-raid on camera, it will contribute to a rising tide of evidence that badgers can be a serious problem in some areas. Many of the tensions around badger predation are made worse by the fact that badger protectionists flat-out refuse to accept that there is an issue in any form. To me, it’s deafeningly obvious that they predate ground-nesting birds – rather than deflect from the subject or deny it, wouldn’t it be more sensible to find out more? I’ll watch this nest with interest in the meantime, knowing that its fate is only one small piece of the puzzle.

And all the while, I continue to search for curlew nests on a hill that is being raked by cold winds and sleet. I know that at least one pair has a nest in the fields we call the bog, but they’re so quiet and subdued by the weather that hours can pass without hearing a single peep from the birds. I would love to have a camera on that nest, particularly since I know that nest predation is the biggest inhibiting factor for these birds. There’s no alternative but to wait and watch.