The calls to work more collaboratively for conservation are becoming louder. For wildlife’s sake it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Many miss the curlew. The State of Nature reports chart declines in much of our wildlife on which we have robust data, which itself covers only 5% of the 70,000 species found across the UK, with curlew one of the most studied birds
with stacks of research to date – 1993 Scotland (nesting), 1999 Northern Ireland (breeding), 2010 England (8 yr moorland), 2010 England and Wales (lowland), 2013 Upland land use, 2015 Wales (habitat), 2016 Scotland (25yr study), 2017 Wales (habitat), 2017 UK (breeding), through to 2017 UK (wader chick predators).
‘Perhaps’, I wrote in a blog for the RSPB, ‘as we’ve urbanised, it has become a poster bird for our lost connection with the countryside’ as we grapple with how to offset impacts of human activities from changing land uses (opinion for Heather Trust), farming practices and wildlife interactions. A trip to The Hague (once a marshy pond – now a high rise city) to listen to farmer group-driven schemes for waders, brought home the need to reconcile a guilt that grips us over our relationship with nature – see here.
The Welsh Curlew conference was one of a series across the UK and Ireland, with Mary Colwell putting in ‘the legwork’ (as well as walking 500 miles) to galvanise researchers, farmers, gamekeepers, wardens, foresters, scientists, and communities to come together, not just for curlew, but for wildlife as a whole.
The day was stuffed full with latent collaborative intent. Even at the surprise of some: “Oh, we couldn’t have talked about that 5 years ago” a conservation NGO attendee told me.
RSPB’s researchers told us of trialling targeted predator control and habitat manipulation (there’s a perfect ratio of rushes to open ground), while GWCT’s researcher reported on selective use of electric fencing, BTO’s Rachel Taylor updated us on tracking curlew (no point when they’re alarmed – listen here), sheep farmers talked of cultural livestock, and a professor of conservation science ‘disrupted’ the audience on opening ourselves up to different views and debate in seeking a holy grail of non-adversarial conservation partnerships.
As Graham Appleton says, curlew can’t wait for a treatment plan. In Ireland they’re moving fast in engaging groups of farmers and ‘gun clubs‘ to look after curlews as well as other ground-nesting birds such as hen harriers; gamekeepers are surveying waders for the BTO in Yorkshire and Shropshire’s Curlew Country has been disseminating results of their initial project.
A wariness in fearing to be seen in cahoots with those carrying guns can defeat the very collaboration required to save wildlife. Perhaps, in the context of shifting public values, if we explain it better, it might enable us to justify the options available on this particular conservation matter.
There’s little point raising the plight of curlews without better informing wider non-conservation minded communities on the various methods to save it. Habitat is key. Changing land management practices another.
And this one. A tricky issue in a modern world when a paper on wildlife management in the UK states the “presence of professional control officers can enable volunteers to engage confidently with management projects without being required to kill”. Another key part of saving curlews.
There is no time for tribalism – non-partisan ‘curlew collaboratives’ are required to to push on. We cannot sit on our hands any longer. Too much has been loved, listened or written, via poem or research, for us to abandon this bird and for it to become a merely a conservation lapel badge.
Scotland’s curlew convention, HRH’s Dartmoor curlew conference, 2020 – new related research from Ireland – April and July, commentary from Prof Ian Newton on curlew, a 60sec vlog on WCD21
(Updated Sept 2018, 19, 20, 21)
Sadly we live in an age of binary debates, the reasons for this are complex ,but there is undoubtedly little critical thinking employed by most of the loudest voices, and this is not being helped by a catchy headline orientated media. The debate on shooting suffers the same problem to the extent that to concede even the smallest point risks loosing the argument. The shooting community (and a speak as a member) does itself no favours when it flatly refuses to acknowledge the appalling raptor persecution happening on some of our managed grouse moors. Maybe if we were prepared to more loudly condemn this, then the anti-shooting lobby would see that there are acres of common ground between us which we both want to fill with the glorious sound of curlew, lapwing and drumming snipe.
I myself shoot birds but with a DSLR not a gun. To be honest, I’ve never understood the allure of it nor am convinced by the more strident claims that it is essential to proper bird conservation (I’m not a scientist so can only go by what I read in various publications).
Yet I completely agree with you Owen, about finding greater common ground between the various nature-concerned groups and individuals, not just on shooting and bird conservation, but more widely in conservation as well.
For me the biggest obstacle we need to overcome is the entrenched negative attitudes many have towards those on the “other” side. In particular I struggle to understand the attitude expressed by some regarding “true” conservationists – e.g. “Rob Shepherd (Hants farmer) telling us about land managers taking back ‘ownership of conservation’s destiny’ during his deadpan delivery of ‘don’t mention buzzards and badgers’” from Rob’s ‘Together for Wildlife’ post. This seems to be quite pertinent when you have nature-concerned rurally dwelling people coming up against nature-concerned urban dwelling people.
To me these kinds of attitudes, also seen with conservation NGOs as well, works against the goals of conservationists – whether farmer, land owner, NGO employee, volunteer etc. This seems to stem from the way some big organisations and well-known individuals aligned to the one-side-of-the-argument conduct themselves toward one another – e.g. anything between Mark Avery and Tim Bonner reflects this.
It’s good to see more collaborative approaches starting to take hold, as examplified by this Curlew collaboration. The more open we are to interacting with “other” views, discussing ideas and ridding ourselves of the entrenched attitude, the better the outcome will likely be for Curlews, Lapwing, Hen Harrier, etc.
Thank you Peter for this very astute comment.