Bitterns, curlews and lapwings at risk as vital wildlife funds dry up

Bird experts call on ministers to plug gap left by EU grants worth millions of pounds

Robin McKie

Sat 8 Dec 2018 16.00 GMT

They are some of the most elusive birds to nest in the UK. Indeed, they hide so well in their reedbed homes that ornithologists can only estimate bittern numbers by counting the sources of the booming sounds made by males in summer. It is a census that has produced alarming results. Only 11 booming bitterns were counted across the country in the 1990s.

But since then the bittern has begun to bounce back – thanks to a remarkable system of EU environment awards called Life grants. One of these, worth €3.9m (£3.5m), has helped ecologists restore the bittern’s reedbeds in South and West Yorkshire and rebuild bittern numbers.

Other threatened species to benefit from Life grants include stone curlews, golden plovers and lapwings, and plants such as the sundew.

But that Life grant system is now under threat itself, and unless a replacement is found a critically important mechanism for saving endangered species will be lost.

“This is an extremely worrying development,” said Alistair Taylor of the RSPB. “The Life fund has played a vital role in holding back destruction of the environment and loss of endangered species. If we lose them, it will make it much harder to stop the rot.”

Continued

Moving rare birds to cost Enterprise Zone £500,000

4 hrs ago

Bill Jacobs  @BillJacobsLTLocal Government Reporter

DEVELOPERS of Lancashire's multi-million 'skills city' are to spend £500,000 on relocating skylarks and lapwings to a new site 35 miles away.

Finding the rare birds a new home is essential to next stage of the Enterprise Zone based at BAE Systems Samlesbury site, once condemned by government ministers as ' the worst in the country'.

In 2012 the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership, brining together councils and businesses, proposed the development aimed at boosting skills and creating 6,000 hi-tech jobs.

In 2014 government ministers Penny Mordaunt and Greg Clark told the LEP they had 'lost confidence' in the scheme, the only one of 24 in England to have attracted no new businesses or produced any new jobs.

On Thursday the Cabinet of Lancashire County Council, a key player in the LEP, will consider an update confirming leases on the land needed had been agreed with BAE Systems and authorising spending of £11.5 million on road and drainage works to prepare more of the site for occupation.

Continued  

Endangered bird finds sanctuary in Northern Irish prison for dangerous inmates

Around 20 pairs of breeding lapwings have made their home at HMP Maghaberry

By AOL Travel, Apr 20, 2015

Updated: April 20, 2015 7:23 AM

Lapwings, one of the world's most threatened birds, have found a sanctuary within a prison used for housing the most dangerous inmates in Northern Ireland.

Life sentence prisoners helped create the habitat for around 20 pairs of breeding lapwings which have made their home at HMP Maghaberry on a marshy no-man's-land dominated by razor wire and lookouts behind reinforced glass.

The six acres of waste ground lies between the perimeter fence and wall of a jail, near Lisburn in County Antrim, more familiar as a holding centre for dissident republicans, sex offenders and murderers. WORDS: PA. 

A combination of swampy short grass because of the clay ground left over from the prison's foundations and the lack of predators like foxes has created the ideal conditions for breeding chicks, retired prison guard and gardener Denis Smyth said.

He added: "Once they are big enough to fly, over the fence they go."

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Lapwing numbers boosted by RSPB nature reserves

Conservationists are thrilled that lapwings, birds which have been disappearing from the UK, have had a successful 2014 breeding season in grassland habitats managed by the RSPB.

Lapwings belong to a group of birds known as waders: typically long-legged birds which generally feed at the water’s edge or in wet grassland. The RSPB manages a number of sites in lowland England where the birds nest, including Otmoor in Oxfordshire and Rainham Marshes on the outskirts of London. The wildlife charity has also been working on Great Bells Farm on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, converting 160 hectares of poor-quality farmland into a freshwater nature reserve. In 2014, many of the RSPB’s sites were able to announce lapwing breeding successes, thanks to land management based on knowledge built up over decades across RSPB nature reserves, in lowland England.

Known as “peewits” after their distinctive call, black-and-white lapwings have a ‘red status’ in the UK, which means that the speed and nature of their decline is causing concern. These birds have been disappearing from lowland England since the middle of the 19th century. The most recent falls in numbers of lapwings is due to changes in agricultural land use. From the mid 1980s they began vanishing from south west England and parts of Wales. This year, numbers of lapwings breeding on RSPB lowland wet grassland reserves grew, with a higher number of chicks fledging, giving conservationists hope that these birds face a brighter future.

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Lapwings and Curlews

RSPB fears for curlew and lapwing in Northern Ireland after "cuts"

The RSPB has concerns over the lapwing's future in Northern Ireland

The director of the RSPB in Northern Ireland has said he fears the curlew could be extinct in the country within a decade.

He also fears the lapwing will be in terminal decline if the Department of Agriculture does not address financial cuts to the countryside management scheme.

The scheme provides grants to landowners for adopting farming practices that enhance the countryside.

It is delivered by the department.

James Robinson, who is director of the RSPB in Northern Ireland, said the scheme helped birds such as the lapwing and curlew which were "red-listed or threatened species".

However, he said a continued reduction in funding could have serious consequences for their future.

"In recent years, farmers have used the grants to help wildlife and they are popular grants," he said.

He said he had estimated that since 2010, about £40m has been cut from Northern Ireland's countryside management scheme.

"This means that farmers who want to join the scheme cannot do so," he added.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-19978811

Farmers and wildlife charities join forces to bring back the lapwing

The lapwing is an iconic bird of the wide open arable lands and the moors of southern England which has suffered a catastrophic decline in recent years.

Now a landscape-scale study across 120 sites in five different counties in lowland Britain – including Dorset – by leading research charity the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) in collaboration with the RSPB is under way to try to reverse the decline.

Scientists hope it will provide crucial information that will help improve Government schemes that pay farmers to put in special wildlife measures to help lapwings.

Latest figures show that lapwing, one of our most widely recognised waders and often called the 'farmer's friend', have fallen by about 50 % over the last 30 years.

Dr Andrew Hoodless, a wader scientist with the GWCT said: "Lapwings are very adaptable birds and because they nest on wet grassland, upland moors or arable land they should be doing quite well, but they are not. We know that the problem is not over-winter survival, but that the lapwings are simply not fledging sufficient chicks each year to maintain a stable population."

Continued:  http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/Farmers-wildlife-charities-join-forces-bring/story-17106910-detail/story.html