Often, in spring, I’m thrilled to hear an unusual wailing call sailing its way with the wind across RSPB Minsmere nature reserve. It sounds like a high-pitched referee’s whistle. This means one thing – the stone curlews are back.
These birds are extremely rare and I always feel privileged to be able to go and see them at Minsmere (not something that everyone gets to do because they are so sensitive to disturbance). Only 347 pairs breed in the UK.
Stone curlews have an extremely unusual courtship display – they spread their tails and wings and run around chasing each other. They are actually classified as wading birds but breed on dry, very bare habitats. In fact, one of the tasks I undertook as a volunteer at RSPB Minsmere this winter was surveying the stone curlew habitat. This took me several days of assessing the numbers of stones, vegetation height and quantity of rabbit poo in squares around the fields at Minsmere. It wasn’t the most exciting job ever, but certainly important given how unusual this species is.
As a species stone curlews suffered one of the fastest ever declines – they lost 85% of their UK population between the 1940s-1980s and fell to around 150 breeding pairs. Their recovery is largely thanks to the work of the RSPB and a lot of it has taken place in the east of England. On the Suffolk coast, Minsmere has become the epicentre of stone curlew breeding.
So how has Minsmere managed this? Well, we have created new stone curlew habitat by converting old arable land back into grassland and heathland. This is called arable reversion. We also provide things like electric fences to protect nest sites from predators.
A lot of this work requires external funding, and some of this funding comes from something called Higher Level Stewardship.
Higher Level Stewardship is a government scheme which provides money for conservation. Personally I hate acronyms and technical jargon, so let me explain. Higher Level Stewardship rewards landowners for measures they take to improve conditions for wildlife.
In part thanks to this funding, Minsmere now has five breeding pairs of stone curlews which this year successfully fledged nine chicks.
Now for the bad news (to fit in with the dramatic picture of a tractor ready to demolish a stone curlew nest at the top of this blog). Higher Level Stewardship is just one scheme which funds wildlife and conservation which is under threat from government spending cuts.
In the east of England, during the 10-year life of all our reserves’ various HLS schemes the RSPB will have received £400,000 for capital works (i.e. one-off costs such as infrastructure – gates or fences for example). HLS provides money which, as you can see, brings direct wildlife benefits on reserves and farms all across the east of England.
So what can we do? Well, we need to halt biodiversity loss, and the coalition government has committed to do this. And we need to send the government and MPs a clear message – Don’t cut our countryside. Today, you can join those who have already sent this message to their politicians. And this week also marks a special milestone. We have now received over 300, 000 signatures for our Letter to the Future campaign asking the government to take spending decisions which benefit nature, wildlife and the environment. You can sign this too.
Matt Williams, Assistant Warden, RSPB Snape