At a time of reducing funding for nature conservation it is good to be able to talk about some good news. An ambitious programme to return the world’s heaviest flying bird to the UK has been given a considerable lift from the European Union by the award of a €2.2m grant from the EU LIFE+ fund.
The project is run by a partnership of the Great Bustard Group, the RSPB, University of Bath and Natural England.
The Great Bustard Group, which has led the project since its inception in 2004, has battled to cover the costs of the project with a hand-to-mouth existence.Releasing great bustards reared from eggs rescued in southern Russia, the project passed a milestone in 2009, when the it saw the first great bustard chicks to hatch in the wild in the UK for 177 years.
“Despite our great successes over the last six years we would sometimes struggle to find £10 or £20 to put diesel in the old Land Rover; now we have the chance to give this project real wings,” says David Waters GBG Director. He continued: “The funding will provide a properly-resourced project, with four new posts, new monitoring equipment and even the possibility of a second release site.”
David Waters added: “The Great Bustard Group is anxious to point out that the grant will not end the funding worries as a quarter of the project costs will need to be found by the project partners, and the LIFE project is very much about new work. Much of the existing work will need to be funded as before.”
Richard Benyon, Natural Environment Minister, said: “This is a great project – it will see a magnificent species return to England as well as help to conserve the other dry grassland birds of Salisbury Plain. The people working on this project have been doing a wonderful job, and deserve congratulations on their success so far.”
Reintroduction projects are not uniformly popular with conservationists or birders. Generally speaking I am a fan of them. Perhaps it's simplistic but I see them as the species equivalent of habitat restoration - such as re-creating reedbeds in the Fens. We know we've lost lots of habitats so we need to protect the ones we still have and re-create some of the ones we have lost. And similarly, we know we've lost some species so we need to protect the ones we still have and reintroduce some of the ones we have lost if they won't come back on their own. That's how I see it.
But of course the work to protect the less charismatic farmland birds continues too - with the prospect of less government support in the future. The RSPB is working on a host of declining farmland birds such as corn bunting, turtle dove and lapwing. And that work continues too. Reintroductions are a bit of a luxury - at the moment one that, with help from the EU, we can afford, but maybe not for ever if funding continues to fall.
And this EU money is difficult enough to get, and the rules on what type of project it can be spent on are sufficiently strict and circumscribed, that if any of it goes on saving EU threatened birds then that is to be welcomed in my view. There are few enough pots of money around, and each of them seems to be getting smaller,
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Charasmatic birds like the Bustards (or Ospreys or Avocets etc) I think do great work for the wider environment and lots of less prominent species. I was hugely impressed by RSPBs wider work on the downland in Wiltshire which has increased Stone Curlew so dramatically - planning to go and see them in the spring. And I believe we should be finding the space for the big birds we eliminated over the past 3 centuries - especially the dramatic wetland birds like Crane.