Today, I am delighted to host a guest blog from my colleague and new RSPB Regional Director for Eastern England, Dr James Robinson.  Here, James highlights the impact of 30 years of effort designed to recover the stone-curlew.

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Back in 1985, I was celebrating my 12th birthday and my world was very different. ‘Back to the Future’ was the must-watch film at the cinema, Madonna was heading to number one in the UK charts  with ‘Into the Groove’, Manchester United beat Everton in the FA Cup final, and I was out every summer weekend playing cricket or watching wildlife in East Yorkshire. It was a great time.

Over the next 30 years, much has changed yet my love for wildlife has remained the same. Back in the 80s, my friends and I would make the pilgrimage across the Humber to the Brecks to catch a glimpse of the extraordinary stone-curlew. I remember the excitement of arriving in the Breckland landscape with its bone-dry sandy heaths and lines of pine trees and to see these wonderfully camouflaged birds with big yellow eyes. At that time, stone-curlews had become one of the rarest birds in the UK, and were really teetering on the brink of extinction as a breeding species - between 1940 and 1985, the UK stone-curlew population had declined by 85%, and by the late 80s there were fewer than 100 pairs left in the Brecks- so there was a definite sense that we had to make the most of the chance to see them before it was too late.

 

Stone-curlew in the Brecks (Chris Gomersall rspb-images.com)

So, imagine my delight last Friday night, at being in a room at the back of an inn in Thetford along with local MP and Environment Secretary Liz Truss and more than 50 farmers, landowners, gamekeepers and conservationists all celebrating the success of 30 years of joint conservation work to turn things around for this iconic bird of my childhood. Since 1985, the people in this room, and others like them, have been working together to reverse the decline of the stone-curlew in the Brecks, reducing  the number of nests accidentally destroyed by farming operations and helping more stone-curlew chicks to fledge the nest. The RSPB has been helping landowners enter stewardship schemes so they can farm for both food and wildlife, creating stone-curlew plots within the arable farmland on which 70% of them now nest. This has played a significant role in the stone-curlew success story in the Brecks.

James with Rt Hon Liz Truss MP, Chris Knights and a splendid cake (Rupert Masefield)

Today, this pioneering landscape-scale conservation partnership has succeeded in nearly trebling the number of pairs of stone-curlews breeding in the area, with nearly 250 pairs recorded breeding in 2012.

It was a wonderful event to mark an even more wonderful story of the successful rescue of a bird on the brink, thanks not just to conservationists working in isolation, but recognising and working with the passion for wildlife and the countryside shared by the people actually responsible for looking after the large majority of it. This was their night.

Of course, there was cake - and special stone-curlew cake at that (see photo) - as well as a very special award for one retired local farm-manager who has done more than most for this bird and its habitats over the decades. Chris Knights was, for many years, the farm manager of the Hilborough Estate, to the north of Thetford Forest in the Brecks. Over the years, largely driven by Chris’ passion for wildlife and stone-curlews in particular, the land farmed by the Hilsborough Estate has become an important part of the stone curlew’s breeding range in the Brecks. In the early days, as Chris recounted to a rapt audience, he even paid his farm workers out of his own pocket for every stone-curlew nest they found and saved!

It was great to have Environment Secretary Liz Truss attend the event, listening with interest to the stories of those who have made the project such a success speaking passionately about the measures they have taken to protect stone curlews on the land they manage. She was full of praise for the many organisations involved and farmers in general speaking of her "pride in representing such a fantastic part of the country which is a great food producing region" and “the farming community working with the RSPB to support wildlife.”

And I’m sure that everyone in the room agreed with her when she said that “Farmland is vital for the state of nature and we cannot have one without the other”.

It’s undeniable that something really positive has been achieved in the Brecks, and it’s always great to celebrate conservation success stories but there is much more to be done. The partnership responsible for the recovery must continue to work together for the stone-curlew and other threatened Breckland wildlife, and the RSPB will continue to play its part, with an EU LIFE+ funded project helping to increase safe nesting places for stone-curlews to pave the way for a more sustainable population.

In another 30 year’s time I hope I will be revisiting the Brecks to see stone curlews in even greater numbers living in safe and sustainable habitat alongside the people of the Brecks who have helped bring them back from the brink.

  • More sterling work by the RSPB. Also great credit must go to the farmers that have been and are part of the stone curlew project. However without the initiation of this project by the RSPB and the drive to go with it, it is doubtful if, by now, we would have any stone curlews in this country.

    Also not forgeting the RSPB initative is not just confined to the Brecklands but extends over at least Salisbury Plain and the Berkshire Downs, where I see stone curlews