Guest blog from Gavin Thomas, Bowland Wader Project Officer.

 

... is what it says on the mug on my desk - part of the recipe for Lapwing breeding success. But how much water? This is indeed ‘Great weather for ducks’ but also apparently ‘great weather for wading birds’ I’m often told. I have to dispel this myth - waders detest this weather as much as the rest of us do.

True, wading birds like wet bits - shallow muddy edged pools, scrapes, wet flushes and ditch edges, and a little rain in the spring does keep these wet features topped up - providing ideal conditions for the invertebrate communities that waders feed on. But, prolonged heavy rain and the resultant increasingly regular floods in the breeding season is nothing short of a nightmare for ground nesting birds.

Those of you who watched Iolo Williams on Springwatch last month picking up Lapwing chick corpses, drowned by flooding on our Ynys-hir reserve in Wales, will have got the message in graphic detail. That scene has haunted many other areas of the UK this spring. Take the entire population of breeding waders at our Ouse Washes reserve in the East Anglian fens for example. This internationally important site, along with the Nene Washes, holds most of the country’s breeding Black tailed Godwits and over a third of all lowland England’s Snipe, all crowded into one area of habitat that (sometimes) remains suitable for them. It is the proverbial all eggs in the one basket scenario.

Being a flood storage area for vast tracts of agricultural land that surround the reserve, the waders at the Ouse Washes took the hit and every clutch of eggs and young chicks was lost. We are working with the Environment Agency, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and landowners and farmers close to the reserve to look for other baskets - habitat free from the flooding risk nearby….

These are lowland wet grassland sites and thankfully here in Bowland, the geography largely protects ground nesting birds from such devastating events. That said, any ground nesting bird that spends prolonged periods off its clutch of eggs in such weather will run the risk of those eggs chilling. Furthermore, for the first few weeks of their life, wader chicks are unable to regulate their own body temperature and need to be brooded by the adults to keep warm. They need to feed regularly too, so prolonged brooding may actually result in the birds dying of starvation. But venturing out to feed into heavy rain through wet vegetation when you are still downy can result in a soaking, a chill and the inevitable. Tough choices eh?

Not all bad news though. Remember the fencepost-top nesting Oystercatcher in Bleasdale? Well that bird clearly avoided any flooding, plus the host farmer reports that two eggs hatched from its clutch of three. Where there’s a wader there’s a way. Perhaps those that make decisions to build housing estates on floodplains should take note!

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