Bog Myrtle & Peat

It all came to nothing in the end. The lapwing chick was inexplicably lost when it was twenty five days old, and a second nest was destroyed by a digger. A third nest appeared and was marked with a traffic cone to protect it from farm machinery – the eggs were saved but the nest was abandoned four days later when a tractor was parked ten feet away overnight and the female bird was too shy to come back. So she watched the eggs chill and then she flew away. 

Down by the river, the oystercatcher chicks were all lost two days after I found them. I suppose a fox had them, and the neighbouring pair had their eggs taken by crows. I followed twelve wader nests this year, and they all ended in failure. Perhaps you’ve noticed that I don’t write about my curlews anymore? That’s because I don’t have any curlews.

For a period at the end of May, there was a burst of activity in the glen towards Dumfries. The first cuts of silage were taken, and many of the best lapwing stubbles were harrowed and resown with grass. I went to the town for work and saw a dozen fields being overturned where birds had been displaying all spring. If they had lasted until now, they were lost anyway. I can’t help feeling that I let the birds down by allowing this destruction – I could have gone to each farmer and asked for permission to mark nests and move chicks. But I didn’t – because like you, I’ve got work to do, and I’m already doing everything I can with my own waders in my spare time. 

Since 2017, I’ve been involved with Working for Waders, which has been publicly commended by the Scottish Government and serves as a flagship collaboration project for NatureSCOT. After several years during which funding steadily declined, no money was made available to run the project in 2024. So it’s over – there are no assurances of more funding in future years, and no suggestion that it’s even being recognised as an “oh dear” moment. Importantly, there are no new projects which offer to focus on wader conservation instead. The work is just not going to get done anymore.

This major project has been allowed to collapse in silence. The subtext here is that if complaints are raised, it might influence future funding prospects – nobody wants to be a menace, and aren’t we all stretched for funding these days? But the counterargument is also true – if such a major project can be axed without any complaint or acknowledgement, surely it wasn’t really needed. You could look at projects around Scotland which still receive funding, asking if these are a greater or lesser priority than wader conservation – or you could just conclude that when we call something “a priority”, we simply mean “important insofar as we think any of this nature stuff is important”.

Instead of a widespread outcry, the project is now treading thin air on a voluntary basis while a handful of people desperately look for money elsewhere. I’m out of work, but it’s not necessarily fury which provokes this note – only a need to mark a sense of my own embarrassment that I’ve been taking it all too seriously. I put everything into wader conservation, and I’m silly enough to believe politicians and civil servants when they pat me on the head and say “great work!”

But many of the people who could really move the dial on wader conservation are gagged or hamstrung by top-level concordats and agreements signed by the terrible flatulent bigwigs who are pouring money into afforestation schemes which decimate wader populations. As a consequence of largely opaque agreements between government and civil servants, some of the most capable people in wader conservation are actually forbidden from saying what they think in public. Even at best, these people have to waste time and energy working out how to air their concerns without being punished for it. The system has deleted its own control mechanism, and it’s also decided that work which used to be considered “vital” can now be quietly abandoned. 

I routinely scan myself for bitterness on this account, but I only find hurt and anger. It’s not an irreconcilable wound, and I still feel tremendous joy in the waders when I find them. But five years ago, I felt like I was part of a rising movement of enthusiasm which would deliver change for species that I sometimes believe that I can’t live without. Now I just feel silly and scored against by a mechanism which never really cared anyway. My consolation is that I shouldn’t have been so frightened of failure. It turns out that life goes on after all.