Bog Myrtle & Peat

The last few weeks have been fraught with activity. Working with a number of enthusiastic observers and volunteers, I’ve forcibly extracted information on curlew breeding attempts from an ambitiously vast piece of rough and varied countryside. It’s been far harder than I thought it would be, and more time consuming than I ever could have feared. I’ve kept a rough log of over one hundred hours spent searching for curlews, and I’ve travelled almost four hundred miles in the truck, on my bike and on foot on the hunt for breeding birds.

Accepting the many limitations of this survey, I’ve finished up with a final figure of twenty eight pairs. It’s certainly no fewer than this, and it’s possible that I might be underestimating the tally by four or five pairs. In certain places, it was just too hard to read the birds’ behaviour, and extra follow-up visits designed to confirm or shed more light failed to offer any help at all. I call it twenty eight, but I suspect it’s more like thirty two or three.

Without a baseline or a benchmark to measure it against, I knew this figure would be meaningless before I started, but I must admit that it’s considerably smaller than my most pessimistic predictions. I can’t tell you what the figure was ten or twenty years ago, but perhaps it would help to visualise the decline if I retrospectively estimate that in 2010, there were twenty five pairs on a group of four farms including my own; a total area of around thirty square kilometres. Maybe that helps to provide some context for the twenty eight pairs I found spread across six hundred and fifty square kilometres in 2022.

The situation is little short of a disaster. Speaking to an ecologist friend about the potential next steps for a conservation project, he advised me to look for clusters of birds where work might be targeted. He defined a cluster as three or four pairs nesting in reasonable proximity, but I only found one cluster like this of three birds. It’s on land that just sold to an investment company for forestry. The trees have already been planted, and these birds are now doomed. Elsewhere there are three groups of two, but the other single pairs are scattered evenly across a vast area in almost isolated pockets. That makes any future conservation effort a great deal harder, and when I asked him what I should do next, my ecologist friend just shook his head. I suppose it’s easier to see what’s possible when you’re standing back at a more objective distance.

In terms of how the birds are faring now, I only know of seven pairs which are still attempting to breed, but there might be as many as fourteen or fifteen. I have not yet heard of any chicks at all, but I’m sure a handful must be out there somewhere. As always, the literal existence of chicks is no indication of success, and a breeding cycle can only be described as complete when young birds fledge and fly away. Judging by what I’ve seen in previous years, we’ll be lucky if more than one or two young birds get off in 2022, and these to replace a far larger number lost through normal adult mortality. I’m no mathematician, but here’s where the problem lies.

I’ve told a few people about the findings from this year’s survey. Each one has expressed a degree of disbelief, but the prevailing sense is one of sorry resignation. Several farming friends have sighed and said “well what can we do?” Standing in the wake of an extended exhaustion, I’m struggling to see what’s next myself. I know that I’ve taken on too much of this concern, and in a small way I note a degree of creeping resentment that it should be my responsibility not only to spot the problem, but also to raise awareness, overcome resistance and then galvanise a constructive, front-footed response. I know I’m not really on my own – I’m extremely grateful to everybody who helped with this survey and I’m delighted that people are willing to help, but I’m sure others will agree that each step forward feels like a lead weight without any gathering of momentum.

I’ll buck up and regroup. With a few weeks to recuperate, I suppose I’ll come out fighting again. But for now it’s worth recording a sense of hopelessness and isolation; that no matter how much work you pour into a project, you’re only pushing water uphill.