Bog Myrtle & Peat

Curlews have a dogged determination to go “home” when the breeding season arrives. It’s a touching expression of loyalty, but it borders on being pig-headedly self-destructive when birds fail to accept change in a landscape. They’ll fly over suitable, productive new habitats in order to find old places which haven’t been good for decades – and it’s hard to watch them fail again and again.

Lapwings are far more flexible and opportunistic; most will return to “good places” every year, but many are geared up to take a chance when the moment presents itself. That’s why I have a single pair in the field below my house this year after an absence of several decades – the old grass was ploughed in and sown with kale, and the conditions are currently perfect for the birds.  But the nature of the crop rotation is such that 2025 will not be perfect for lapwings here. We’ll be back into permanent grassland for at least ten years. If these birds come back at all in 2025, there’s almost no chance that they’ll nest here. They’ll simply go somewhere else, and that’s a challenge for wader enthusiasts like me because unless I can integrate a constantly changing rotation of heavy interventions on the cropping at my own farm, I’m only ever going to be chasing the game, helping birds wherever they pop up and then losing them again.

Even where habitats are more steady and stable, it’s strange to learn that lapwings aren’t always reliable there either. A friend in Invernesshire has spent a tremendous amount of time on managing wet grassland for lapwings and seemed on the path to certain and growing success with the birds. But then nothing whatsoever returned to breed in 2023 – and nothing has turned up since. It’s puzzling, and it makes lapwings oddly mercurial outliers in a general trend towards conservatism amongst most other species of wading birds. 

In the context of change and opportunity, plans are already underway to overturn this field where the lapwings had managed to hold onto a single chick. It’s generally reckoned that the first step towards new grassland is the complete destruction of all existing vegetation. There are other ways to clean and work a field, but a spray with roundup is the established course of action. When I spoke to the farmer about the potential impact of this activity on the lapwings, he was dismayed – but he did insist that it would have to be done. We were at an impasse. I had no real evidence to show that spraying would harm the birds, but it flew in the face of everything I wanted to encourage. 

When similar situations have arisen in the past, farmers have sometimes tried to reassure me that roundup is completely safe for animals. But if it’s completely harmless, I’m not sure why livestock have to be shut out of fields which are being sprayed. There are half a dozen problems which could arise from spraying lapwing chicks with roundup – but even beyond the longer-term effects of herbicide treatments, it’s even possible that the one surviving chick could just be squished beneath the tyres of the sprayer; a daft and ignominious end.

This particular field is quite isolated from others like it. There are trees and scrub woodland on three sides, and only a small paddock of wet ground and meadowsweet to the south. The birds often hang around by the fence which divides the field from this paddock, and I wondered if it would be possible to move them there before the spraying began. The farmer was happy that I should try this, and given that it only amounted to a distance of less than fifty yards, it seemed like a low-risk option. But three lessons came out of this plan.

1- Contractors – The spraying contractor was billed to arrive at lunchtime. I planned to move the chick shortly before he arrived to be sure that it didn’t just walk back into the line of fire again. However, the sprayer turned up at 10:55am – and I absolutely wasn’t ready for him. It’s a crucial and recurring point that contractors are frequently incompatible with wader conservation. No matter what the farmer wants, the contractor is bound by the desire to do as much as possible within the constraints of what implements are available, how difficult each implement can be to use, where drivers are and how much can be done before the rain comes. 

When it comes to the specific tasks required to protect waders (marking nests, moving chicks etc), it’s extremely difficult to match up contractor timetables with the availability of volunteers to intervene on behalf of waders. It’s a really tough knot, and unpicking the detail requires a tremendous amount of planning and work – which invariably falls to the wader enthusiast. Even within myself, I sense a growing frustration that the entire job of conserving waders is my responsibility – because nobody else is under any obligation to do anything differently. I find myself I cajoling, begging, nudging, bribing and pursuing an extensive list of people each year, not in the hope that they won’t destroy nests or eggs or chicks – but that they will permit me to “have a go” at mitigating the damage when it inevitably happens. It’s a perverse dynamic, constantly snatching a glimmer of hope from the jaws of certain destruction – and I’m not sure it’s making sense to me anymore. 

2 – Chicks – Never try and do anything with wader chicks when you’re under pressure for time. It’s hard to find nests, but chicks are a complete nightmare – even at the best of times when things are calm and you can work at your own pace. As the sprayer arrived in the field, I was completely overwhelmed with stress and horror. I actually spoke out loud to the chick which was hiding within eight or ten feet of me, using a mixture of swearwords and incoherence, saying “if you let me find you, I will protect you”. But I couldn’t find it. And ten minutes later, the sprayer drove over the spot where I had been looking.

3 – Sprayer – The field smelled strange that day, and the birds were quiet. I shut the windows and tried not to think about it. But five days later as the grass begins to turn a fatal orange colour, the chick is still alive and well. I caught up with it this morning and found it exactly where a chick should be at fourteen days old, with the first few flossy quills of brown scapular feathers emerging. It’s big and fleshy and warm, and it ran away from me like an adult bird. It shows no ill effects from having been sprayed, and perhaps so long after the event, it’s possible that it won’t.

There are still two weeks to go until it fledges, and two more sessions of tractorwork to be undertaken before this field can be sown with grass – but we’re still in the game. And as the field dies and the cover diminishes, perhaps the birds will naturally move down into the wetter areas anyway. I will have to keep watching and trapping crows and scanning the fields at night with lamp and thermal, but hope still survives.