Stone curlews are strange, eerily beautiful birds. The size of a crow, with a large head, long yellow legs and long wings and tail (relative to its size), they are active at night, using their large yellow eyes to find food in the dark.
Their eye together with their cryptic plumage make them look somehow primitive, like a miniature feathered dinosaur. Not too long ago they also came very close to becoming extinct as a breeding bird in the UK. Decades of habitat loss caused their numbers to fall by more than 85 per cent between 1940 and 1985, to just 160 pairs in the whole country.
In the East of England, stone curlews held on in their stronghold of the Brecks, and intensive intervention by the RSPB and other conservation organisations, working together with local landowners and farmers, has helped the population there to treble in 30 years.
Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Weeting Heath nature reserve in the heart of the Brecks is known as the place to see ‘stonies’, and at Minsmere itself the RSPB has been working to restore grass heathland (the stone curlew’s preferred habitat) with great success. Nine pairs nested on the reserve last year and some of the birds now breeding at Minsmere are known to have come from the Brecks, indicating that the increased numbers there are enabling birds to disperse and establish themselves at other sites where there is suitable breeding habitat.
While this approach to saving stone curlews has helped their numbers, the long term goal is to reduce the need for intensive intervention and management and have truly sustainable populations- the dream of all conservationists- in the Brecks, on the Suffolk coast and elsewhere in the country. To help achieve this, the EU LIFE+ Project - Securing the future of the stone-curlew in the UK is seeking to increase the proportion of stone-curlews nesting on safe habitat to over 75 per cent, with the ultimate goal of stone-curlews producing enough young to sustain the population without interventions on cropped land. Find out more here
Help keep rare wildlife like stone curlews and the places they live safe for future generations: http://www.rspb.org.uk/defendnature #defendnautre
Nature Minute: Stone curlew
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