There are 60,000 breeding curlew sets in the UK, the 3rd greatest breeding population worldwide behind Finland and Russia. But numbers have actually cut in half in the last thirty years – due mainly to a boost in predation and modifications to farming practices – and the types is now on the UK’s preservation ‘red list’.
The Yorkshire Dales is among the most crucial environments in the UK for these wading birds and has actually been selected as the place for a curlew tagging job.
A joint job in between the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority – in collaboration with estate supervisors, farmers, landholders and other regional stakeholders – it includes utilizing GPS innovation to keep track of the motion and breeding practices of curlews in the Dales, especially in Wensleydale.
The birds are captured and use the tags like a rucksack. Data is transferred to mobile phones at routine periods, permitting the scientists to track the motion of the birds in genuine time.
The Yorkshire Dales job, moneyed by Defra’s Farming in Protected Landscapes program, includes tracking 17 birds in various phases of the breeding season in numerous environments – silage, hay meadow, grazing pasture and rough grassland/moorland.
This info can then be utilized to for land management – for instance, how and where to cut silage or graze livestock – to reduce the effect on the birds’ breeding season.
Dr Samantha Franks, senior research study ecologist at the BTO, said the assistance of regional farmers and other stakeholders had actually been “definitely dazzling” and essential to the job.
“Some of the them have actually come out to enjoy us capture the birds and see them being tagged,” she said.
“Some of them have not seen a curlew that close and the search their faces is actually incredible from our point of view.
“We’ve had remarkable assistance from farmers and supervisors permitting us access to their land – they’re extremely in tune with what the birds are doing, we could not have actually done it without them.”
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Now that the breeding season is over, the ecologists are taking a look at the information to see what they can learn more about the “renowned types” and if it would be valuable to customize farming approaches.
Dr Franks, lead scientist on the job said although there is a big population of curlews in a worldwide sense, she has actually talked to some older Dales farmers who state the number of waders are simply a portion of what they utilized to be.
She is now hoping that the job can help reverse the recent trajectory of the decreasing population and return the breeding waders better to what those farmers keep in mind from “the good old days”.
