Posted on behalf of Emily Field, Project Manager - Stone-curlew UK (EU LIFE+)
Our final blog in this series comes from Dominic Ash. Dominic joined the MoD Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) as an ecologist on Salisbury Plain in 1995. Part of his role was to ensure that management and use of the site did not conflict with designated speciesand habitats. Stone-curlews are a designated feature of the Special Protection Area, and juggling their needs with that of the military, archaeology, tenant farmers, and other wildlife is not a straightforward task.
Creation and management of fallow nesting plots in suitable areas, as well as rotation of cattle grazing in foraging areas, has maintained the stone-curlew population. In his new role at DIO, he has helped to secure the restoration of around 3,000 hectares of grass heath at the MoD’s Stanford Training Area (STANTA) in eastern England to benefit stone-curlews and over 300 other priority species. Dominic often spends his own time monitoring the birds and ringing chicks.
Dominic Ash, weighing a stone-curlew to egg on Salisbury Plain to estimate its hatch date. Image: Dominic Ash
"I can remember seeing my first stone-curlew in the late 1970s as it flew in off the sea at Portland. I met up with the early project staff in the mid-1980s while volunteering at Martin Down National Nature Reserve with my future colleague and fellow stone-curlew manager Paul Toynton.
In the late 1980s I got a job with the Nature Conservancy Council working on the designation of Salisbury Plain. From there, I started looking at management of the chalk downland, which included stone-curlews.
When I took a job with the Ministry of Defence on Salisbury Plain in the mid-1990s, I took on the management of the eastern side of Salisbury Plain. This included a stone-curlew management plan. I developed the programme of creating stone-curlew breeding sites and assessing their success.
I worked with the various staff of the RSPB stone-curlew project and fed in the data, by finding nests, ringing chicks and assessing outcomes. In this time we raised the stone-curlew population on the Ministry of Defence estate from 16 pairs to 35.
When you can manage a site like Salisbury Plain into one of such high quality for nature conservation, when on summer evenings you can sit and watch stone-curlews, see Montagu’s harriers and hobbies flying around you, hear quails and common curlews and watch brown hares, grey partridges, wheatears and lapwings using your managed plot, why wouldyou want to do anything else?"
For more information on the stone-curlew project that all our heroes have been involved in, please visit www.rspb.org.uk/securingthestonecurlew