Where have all our Curlew gone?

Most people now know that the Curlew is in decline. Most will have heard that despite still being found in large numbers in the UK, the Curlew population has fallen significantly in recent years and is now about a quarter of the worldwide population. Most will have heard that given the decline it is necessary to support the Curlew with better conservation measures. Many may have been aware that the decline of the Curlew is due to habitat loss due to agricultural improvement and forestry and that rising numbers of predators are also affecting the ability of Curlew to rear chicks. A good number of you also know that one way to support Curlew is stop further afforestation in our uplands.

However, I suspect very few of you are aware that much of the above is a fallacy and the real causes of decline are a closely guarded secret in the birding community that gets in the way of the RSPB’s mission to stop forestry. I will outline my case.

Graphs of curlew numbers show a distinct and dramatic decline in the numbers of breeding birds in the UK with the sharpest declines occurring around 2010 before flattening. This date is significant for several reasons, but it is fair to say that upland afforestation in the UK since 1993 to 2013 had been minimal, so perhaps forestry is not the culprit? There has also been 20 years of agri-environmental schemes, designations of SSSIs, SACs and SPAs, a plethora of habitat regulations and generally a greater focus on environmental farming in in the same period; surely habitat loss cannot be the cause of decline? Perhaps the ban on fox hunting (2004) might the culprit? However, anyone living in the countryside knows that legislation changed very little. So why have Curlew numbers declined recently?

As we all know from good detective stories, you must go back further in time. Normally, when we talk wildlife decline the baseline lies back in 1970 so why do the Curlew graphs only go back to the 1990s? Having dug a little deeper some graphs can be found with data from the 1980s and no surprises we find the Curlew population today in the UK is higher than it was in the 1980s before rising in the 1990s. So what happened in 1982? England, Wales and Scotland stopped shooting Curlew, that’s what!

However, Ireland and Northern Ireland didn’t stop shooting Curlew and the French still shoot them. But so what, the Curlew is a British Resident bird, isn’t it? Well, not really! Ringing studies show breeding Curlew in Scotland and Northern England spend their winters in Ireland and our poor English birds take their chances on the shores of France. The same studies also recorded the main cause of mortality in the 1970s (60%) was shooting and from current French population estimates and bag records it indicates they still take between 40% and 60% of the over wintering population. 

The Irish situation also needs considering further as it is Ireland that has the steepest and most dramatic declines. Their population (resident and overwintering) has crashed and is now less than 80% of its earlier population. The cause for declines is again postulated by the BTO and RSPB as loss of habitat and predation, with not a mention of shooting. However, when shooting was banned in 2012 the population stabilised in Scotland. Furthermore studies have shown no declines associated with forestry and in the BTO’s own recent paper, they show some evidence to support higher numbers of Curlew close to forestry! It is clear that a major cause for Curlew decline is being omitted from the narrative as it doesn’t serve the birding community’s wider campaign.

However, the story doesn’t end with shooting and there may be another culprit. The EU Water Frameworks Directive? Various legislation has been enacted to limit the pumping of sewage into our seas, stemming from the early 1990s but the EU threatened to prosecute the UK in 2010 if action was not taken and it was. Anyone who was a sea angler in the latter part of the last century knows that the best place to dig bait was in the stinking black silts close to a sewage outlet and these were found right round our coast. Our seas and estuaries had been fed for 150 years with our waste. Awful as this may have been it supported a vast coastal biomass of worms, crustaceans, fish (including the now rare silver eel), sea birds and especially waders on their overwintering homes.

Our estuaries now have acres of golden sands and clear water where once they oozed with foul smelling mud but ow, no mussel beds, no worms and no birds. Research into this is not easy to find but it is there and studies in the UK and Europe all recognise the decline is real and significant. One other supporting piece of evidence comes in the form of the Snipe. This tiny wader is the only British wader to be increasing in numbers and it is a bird found on the same breeding habitat as the Curlew. Yes it is notoriously difficult to shoot but it also doesn’t spend its winters searching for food on the bare sands of our coast.

Summing up.

Yes, the Curlew has had a recent decline, but the population is still higher than its population level of the 1980s. The impact of recent shooting in Ireland and ongoing in France is very significant and the crash in the Irish population has had a direct impact on that of the North of the UK. 

There is an unrecognised but potentially very significant impact on our overwintering populations from cleaner seas with less food to support previous population levels of our of sea birds. Studies show that populations eventually move to better feeding grounds and some studies indicate that Russian populations have increased with a warming climate.

What is also self-evident is that the lower populations of birds mean breeding habitat is not limiting and not restricting populations. We know that in some areas, like Orkney, can support breeding densities 5-10 times higher that found on moors.

The RSPB and BTOs current story about the Curlew is a fallacy and must not be used to set the agenda for our uplands and forest policy..

Supporting papers and references will be provided in a further paper to follow.