Bog Myrtle & Peat

I met a surprising degree of resistance when I came to launch a curlew survey earlier in the month. It’s risky to put your head above the parapet at the best of times, but curlew conservation has become steadily stickier over the last few years. Some people regard the issue as a battleground by proxy to the issue of shooting for sport, and because curlews are so dearly regarded by shooting folk, some anti-shooting campaigners now consider it their duty to dislike the birds. It’s mucky and it doesn’t make much sense.

In the aftermath of the survey’s launch in Galloway, I was surprised that many curlew devotees were actively hostile to the idea of counting birds. In person and on social media, they complained that there is no time to waste on a survey, and that the only real route to safety is through rapid action. I received a few long messages about the significance of commercial grassland management as a driver of curlew decline, and there was a constant stream of criticism that we will not see progress for these birds until we can address the issue of predation.

On the other side of the coin, several people complained that curlews are declining because the shooting community releases so many pheasants each year, and these birds generate such a vast amount of carrion that the local population of predators is buoyed and spills over to kill a host of groundnesting birds. They reasoned that curlews are doomed if we cannot stop driven pheasant shooting, and I’ve heard all these arguments both for and against action before. There’s probably some truth in all of them, but perhaps you’ll start to see why I was confused by these divergent reactions. I had asked for help to count the birds. Instead, people gathered round to tell me why there are so few.

The word survey was a particular sticking point. Surveys are the domain of scientists, ecologists and people who have developed a reputation for talking. That’s unfair, but by embarking on a “survey”, I was being billed as a fiddler; yet another time-waster out to prove and reprove the same old obvious facts. There’s a well-established “off the shelf” model of conservation based around surveys which allows scientists to count a species into extinction. I’m afraid it’s been used on the black grouse we have here in Galloway; as each year swings around, funding is allocated to count the birds and produce a number which is always smaller than the number we had the year before. This generates a sense of proactivity, but the work has become completely detached from practical outputs. It’s just counting; birdwatching disguised as conservation.

So when I came to say I was counting curlews, it looked to some like I had gone over to this school of thought. It’s a reasonable criticism, particularly since I’ve often complained about the dangers of producing a number but failing the species.

In part two of these updates, I bemoaned the fact that farmers have taken curlews for granted, but the same applies to ornithologists and conservationists too. The local RSPB branch does not keep any record of breeding curlews in the area, and the SOC’s Bird Report 2019 has no records of breeding curlews anywhere in the entirety of Dumfries and Galloway. This latter document is an entertaining mix of stringent objectivity and biases which smell like thinly processed anecdotes, but its lack of breeding curlew records adds to a general sense that nobody is watching as this disaster unfolds. It’s not to say that curlews did not breed that year – they simply were not seen or counted, and there’s more irony in that fact that as some farmers damn me for walking the walk of a birdwatcher, the birdwatchers aren’t doing work they’d usually consider their own.

The curlew survey I’m working on is a useful tool to raise the alarm, but it’s also rooted in a growing understanding of how conservation is supported in this country. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to start with a survey – so in a way I’m simply “playing the game” and using this work as a tool to access the funding we’ll need to break out of a downward spiral. Perhaps I’m being cynical in this, but I can’t deny that running a survey has been really useful in driving me to meet new people, cover new ground and grasp a sense of what’s wrong.

I thought I knew a fair amount about waders in Galloway, but the last few weeks have blown the lid off that. My eyes are far more open now, but for all that I’ll have done lots of work on this by the time the project ends on May 15^th, I cannot allow myself to believe that I’ve done anything more than prepare to take an initial step.

I agree that curlews cannot wait to be saved, and the frighteningly small number of birds I’ve found so far would seem to suggest that they’re already on the brink of collapse. At times like these, surveys can feel like obfuscation, so when I’m challenged to prove that I’m not just “more of the same” now, I force myself to go back through a useful story of why I’m here and where I’m going.