10 December 2007

       News release issued by the RSPB, reporting on joint work by Natural England and
the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

Challenging year ahead for stone-curlews

One of East Anglia’s rarest birds faces an uncertain future as farming goes through a period of change.

Nearly two-thirds of the UK’s stone-curlews – some 200 pairs – nest in the Breckland area of Norfolk and Suffolk. Numbers have been slowly growing in recent years thanks to farmers who work closely with conservation workers.

Stone-curlews nest on the ground and in the Brecks area covered by the RSPB/Natural England stone-curlew project this year, field staff found 219 nests from 150 pairs of stone-curlews. Seventy of these nests – nearly a third of those monitored by the RSPB and Natural England – were on specially created bare plots, set-aside and sugar beet.

However, changes in the farming scene could mean these are at risk – and conservation bodies say a big effort will be needed to ensure nesting areas remain.

Some 27 nests this spring and summer were in ‘stone-curlew plots’ in arable fields. Of these, 13 nests were on plots created under Natural England’s Wildlife Enhancement Scheme (WES), which ended earlier this year. Four were on plots created in the new Higher Level Scheme of Environmental Stewardship.

Ten nests were on set-aside or fallow land managed for stone-curlews at Knights Farms Ltd – farmer Chris Knights is a well-known stone-curlew enthusiast. Elsewhere, 14 nests were on other areas of set-aside not deliberately managed for stone-curlews.

Set-aside has been set at zero percent for 2008. This risks the loss of stone-curlew nesting sites, especially on plots created on set-aside through specially agreed ‘exemptions’ to the normal set-aside management.

Twenty-nine nests were in sugar beet – a fairly open spring sown crop – yet there is uncertainty about sugar beet’s future, especially with the current high prices for wheat. Wheat crops are unsuitable for stone-curlew nesting.

The RSPB and Natural England will be hoping to persuade farmers in the Brecks to move nesting plots under the WES and set-aside to the new Higher Level Scheme under Environmental Stewardship. Another option will be to add stone-curlew plots to existing agreements in the Environmentally Sensitive Area scheme.

The RSPB’s farmland adviser, Simon Tonkin, expects to be directly assisting farmers with their paperwork. “It hardly overstates it to say that the future health of the stone-curlew population depends on progress in the next few months,” said Simon Tonkin.

“Farmers in the Brecks have a great record for helping stone-curlews, so while the scale of the task is scary, I am optimistic that working in partnership with Natural England we can secure enough new agreements to keep stone-curlew numbers growing slowly,” he continued.

A recent workshop run jointly by Natural England and the RSPB on management for stone-curlews was well received by Breckland farmers.

Nick Sibbett of Natural England, said: "There’s an open door here at Natural England to help stone-curlews and we hope farmers will get in touch if that’s what they’d like to do. We’re especially interested to hear from farmers who would like to have stone-curlew plots and we’ll do our best to help.”

The number of breeding stone-curlews in the Breckland area of Norfolk and Suffolk remained similar to last year. The RSPB/Natural England stone-curlew project located 150 breeding pairs, compared with 154 pairs in 2006. Productivity – the number of chicks fledged per pair – was a little better than last year, with 97 fledged young in total, or 0.65 fledged per pair.

The total number of breeding pairs in the Brecks, including those outside the RSPB/Natural England survey area, principally the Elveden Estate which organises its own monitoring scheme, is now at least 205 pairs.

The national population of stone-curlews this year was 347 pairs, of which 121 pairs were in ‘Wessex’, centered on Salisbury Plain, with the remainder in north and west Norfolk and the Suffolk coast.

Away from the Brecks, 15 pairs (up from 10 in 2006) fledged ten young in north and west Norfolk, steady progress in seeing these birds come back to parts of their former range. On the Suffolk coast, the six pairs found was one down on seven in 2006, but they fledged an exceptionally good 12 young. Six of these were from RSPB's Minsmere Nature Reserve where habitat has been specially created for nesting stone-curlews. There has been no confirmed breeding in south Cambridgeshire since 1999.

The stone-curlew project in Eastern England has been running since 1985 and, together with a similar project in Wessex, is part of Action for Birds in England, a conservation programme involving the RSPB and Natural England. Funding enables fieldworkers to work with farmers to safeguard eggs and chicks during routine farming work.

ends

Contacts:
Tim Cowan, RSPB stone-curlew project officer                    01842 821787
Simon Tonkin, RSPB farmland adviser                             01603 660066
Chris Durdin, RSPB Eastern England office                               01603 660066
Nick Sibbett, Natural England                                   01284 731478 

Notes to editors:

• Stone-curlews used to number more than 1,000 breeding pairs in England before habitats were lost to arable farming and forestry after the second world war. The bird was found in 23 English counties in the nineteenth century, stretching from the Yorkshire Wolds to Essex to Dorset.
  
• It is one of the species most vulnerable to disturbance and its eggs and chicks are so well camouflaged that they are almost impossible to spot.
  
• There are two main populations of the bird – in the Brecklands, which straddle the Norfolk-Suffolk border (205 pairs in 2007) and on and around Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire (121 pairs in 2006). Adding in the smaller populations in north Norfolk and east Suffolk takes the total of pairs in 2007 to more than 347. The RSPB and Natural England hope that stone-curlews will return to areas not used for more than 30 years.
  
• The stone-curlew is about the length of a crow but slimmer, more elegant and with much longer wings. Its most striking characteristics are its long yellow legs and large yellow eyes, the power of which enables it to feed on insects at night.
  
• The stone-curlew is not related to the Eurasian curlew – a familiar bird of the moors and hills of northern Britain – but is so named because it has a similar, wailing call. It is particularly vocal at dusk. It is a migratory bird spending winters in southern Spain, south-west France, Algeria, Morocco and west Africa, though very occasionally over-wintering in Breckland.
  
• Stone-curlews arrive at English breeding grounds in late March or April and stay until October. They lay two eggs in a shallow scrape or hollow on the ground and can have one or two broods. Young do not fly until they are between 36 and 42 days old.
  
• In England, it inhabits dry, sparsely vegetated, open ground including farmland but on the continent the bird also nests on safe, sandy islands where rivers have divided. Spain is the bird’s European stronghold.
  
• Most European populations of stone-curlew are falling because more farmland is becoming intensively managed. In England, stone-curlew projects have bucked this trend. Working closely with farmers, nests are found and safeguarded from damage by tractor hoeing and other agricultural operations.
  
• The stone-curlew is now one of 26 birds subject to government-backed Biodiversity Action Plans aimed at safeguarding their future and/or reversing declining numbers by or before 2010.