Conservationists turn gamekeeper to protect lapwing and curlew

A rippling line of lapwings, freshly risen from wetland, can be a mesmerising sight on a winter’s day. As their dark, floppy wings rise and fall the broken flicker of sun along their brilliant white bellies could be a lighting effect for a Eurovision stage – but is more justly affecting and sublime.

It’s a sight, perhaps, for later in the year, when the cold really bites into Europe, for Ireland’s winter lapwings are now, almost entirely, migrants from the east. Like the curlew, the lapwing, Vanellus vanellus, is being squeezed out of the island as a native bird needing somewhere safe to nest.

Both are casualties of intensifying use of land. In the mid-1800s, as Dublin ornithologist John Watters described, the lapwing was abundant round the year "and is the first wading bird that approaches the metropolis for the purposes of nidification [breeding]." Surviving wide human consumption both of the birds and their eggs, "it has somewhat diminished in numbers, in consequence of the great advance of drainage and reclaiming of wastelands in Ireland".

Permanent (and still wet) grassland suited nesting lapwings well enough, with plenty of earthworms and insects for food. Arable farming, too, with spring-sown crops, kept the birds nesting in the lowlands. But today’s intensive pastures cropped for silage and the switch to autumn-sown cereals and pesticide sprays have rendered farmland increasingly inhospitable.

Destructive drainage

In Northern Ireland, this tight land management was partnered by destructive drainage of the river Blackwater catchment. The breeding lapwing population, already down from 21,500 to 3,200 during the 1990s, was estimated in 2010 to be no more than 250 pairs. In the Republic, it is now less than 2,000 pairs – an almost 90 per cent decline.

Throughout the island, and for both lapwing and curlew, the impact of predators on dwindling gatherings of nesting birds has been severe. The lapwing’s clamorous harassment of intruders, tirelessly wheeling and screaming abuse, is part of the bird’s identity. But such protest, and even brave collective mobbing, is little use against single-minded foxes, mink, ravens and other crows.

With the need to see predators coming, both curlew and lapwing seek sites well clear of trees and scrub. Lapwing have sought refuge on abandoned peatland around Lough Boora, in the north of Co Offaly. Here, Bord na Móna has been creating new wilderness areas, with lakes for waterbirds. At the Boora Nature Reserve, one July, I watched skeins of lapwings sifting down to join redshanks, ducks and grebes that breed along the lake margins.

Land at Boora owned by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and closely managed for conservation of the grey partridge, has also proved an exceptional refuge for the lapwing, who sometimes nest on bare peaty marl, with little or no plant cover in any direction. Even better, the systematic removal of predatory birds and mammals has helped more of their chicks to survive.

Radio-tagged chicks

The project, led by Dr Kieran Buckley, covered 75 hectares of former cutaway bog where lapwing nests were most numerous. One chick from each of 40 broods was radio-tagged and tracked three or four times a week as it pecked for insects through the area's sparse vegetation. The numbers of predators culled by various means during the two-year study make a striking list: 62 foxes, 354 rats, 33 stoats, 14 mink, 20 feral cats, 884 rooks, 149 magpies, 140 hooded crows.

Half of the tagged chicks survived until fledging age. Of the rest, tag recovery showed that half were eaten by foxes and others by birds of prey, such as the sparrowhawk, and “probably” by rooks, more notorious for stealing eggs. So predation caused almost all the deaths despite the vigilant culling. With its intervention, however, the overall fledging success of the broods more than made up for normal adult mortality.

The same legion of predators have helped to bring the curlew to the brink of extinction, a conservation challenge discussed at a national workshop held yesterday in Co Westmeath by BirdWatch Ireland and UCD.

In the 1980s, there were about 5,000 breeding pairs of curlew in the Republic, nesting on hillsides since lost to forestry and upland “reclamation” driven by European Union farm grants, and on raised bogs drained and cut for peat. Today, NPWS surveys have found fewer than 150 pairs, a critically small number.

BirdWatch Ireland has been trying hard to save habitats, both by direct activity and in helping to recruit farmers to agri-environment grant schemes. In the Shannon callows, a key NPWS wader refuge, it has helped maintain a fence proof against foxes – if not floods. And in Co Donegal, it has hired a shooter to cull foxes and crows in defence of curlews nesting in the Blue Stack hills.

Thus, the conservationist turns old-fashioned gamekeeper, as protecting biodiversity dictates the balance of wildlife predators and prey.

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks