As spring’s green succulence at last starts to transform our countryside – one of the great delights at this time of year is to spend time with waders. The huddled grey flocks of winter are transformed into noisy show-offs. Lapwings tumble, ecstatically wheeling and wheezing over brown earth while curlew bubble and trill and snipe drop through the air, using the wind to make their tail feathers thrum like bleating sheep.
The tragedy is that there are so few places where these sounds bring spring to life; especially in the south of England. There are still some nature reserves where conditions are made favourable for waders to feed and nest. But the picture is gappy and threadbare beyond nature reserves waders are hard to find in spring. And that can’t be right – it’s a wonderful treat to watch waders when visiting a nature reserve – but not long ago these were birds common and widespread in the countryside.
The common place and familiar is what sustains us day to day – last Friday I was on a coach heading north to York (it was our annual Members’ Weekend at the university). I saw one displaying lapwing in a field in Lincolnshire (I will have missed some others but it’s clear lapwings are now nowhere near common place and familiar in much of our countryside in spring.
In one of those timely coincidences a copy of our Lapwing Landscapes newsletter popped into my in-tray; and you can find it under downloads on this page – it’s a really good read. This project covers an extensive area of river valleys and farmland south of Oxford covering the Upper Thames Tributaries including the Cherwell and the Ray. It’s a huge collaborative effort involving the RSPB, Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust, Natural England, the Environment Agency and the real heroes of the project – the farmers and landowners that are making the difference for waders and farmland wildlife.
The signs are encouraging – with waders beginning to respond to improved conditions created for them. 2010 will see a repeat of a survey carried out five years ago which found 218 pairs of waders, since when 600ha of wet grassland have been created.
One of the techniques used has been to deploy the Rotary Ditcher – a serious boy’s toy, run for the RSPB by agricultural contractors RC Baker Ltd. This chunky bit of kit can delicately create shallow wet features in the landscape, ideal for waders, while at the same time chucking the soil scrapped out of the ditch 40 feet away – tremendous, and here's a picture of it!