The Brecks is one of the landscapes of my childhood. The first night I stayed in a hotel was on a family holiday based in Attleborough. To be honest, I can't remember much about the holiday beyond being a bit anxious as we helped my Mum down a vertiginous ladder into one of Grimes Graves. But in later years the birds came to the fore - in the late 1980s I took my Dad to see the last regular nesting pair of red-backed shrikes in the UK, a bird he had known in his own youth was about to make its last stand in the Brecks before disappearing as a regular breeding bird. Of course, we still had some hope as we settled down with the wardens to watch them - but not much.
But enough of these bitter sweet recollections. Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of spending an afternoon celebrating the RSPB stone curlew project's silver anniversary. Twenty-five years of working with farmers and landowners in the Brecks has reversed the fortunes of another bird that was on the slippery slope to becoming 'no longer a regular breeding bird'. We were the guests of the Hilborough estate where their dedicated staff and our team have boosted stone curlew numbers four-fold. The Brecks is now home to over two hundred pairs, two thirds of the UK's population. Our party was shown a flock of these strange and enigmatic birds in a field of potatoes. Stone curlews have taken standing about to an art form and we were able to explain to our party that the birds we were watching would feed at night, building up to their autumn migration in a few weeks time.
The recovery of stone curlews in the Brecks is a success story. The efforts of landowners, farmers and conservationists have ensured that the stone curlew's fate is very different to those red-backed shrikes - and that really is something to celebrate. The importance of the Brecks for stone curlews is the reason parts of the area have been designated a Special Protection Area under the Birds Directive. This designation is critical in helping to influence major landuse decisions and development proposals and to give the bird's recovery the best chance of sustaining into the future. The next few months will see a series of important decisions that have the potential to affect stone curlews for good or ill, not least the hottest topic of all - plans to dual the A11. You will be able to follow their story through this blog.