The RSPB's "UK Action Plan to Save Curlew" highlights the detachment that the RSPB have from successful estates, land managers and keepers

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On World Curlew Day the NGO read with interest that the RSPB have launched a UK Action Plan to Save Curlew. This is an interesting notion considering that they have spent a lot of time and RSPB members’ hard earned money attacking some of the few places where curlews are thriving… driven grouse moors.

This lack of acknowledgment highlights the detachment that the RSPB have with successful estates, land managers and gamekeepers. Curlew are thriving in the northern uplands where active predator control programmes are carried out by professionals intent on managing the habitat for the good of all species, not just headline grabbing ones. Staff working on the RSPB’s flagship upland reserve, Geltsdale, have privately admitted to a group of visiting gamekeepers that the reserve would not be as successful if it were not for the hard work and dedication of surrounding grouse moors.

Curlew are now so successful on grouse moors that there is a recognised surplus which can be moved to populate other areas where there are none.

The Curlew Head Start Project, run by the Duke of Norfolk, is starting to reap rewards. The aim of this project is to take curlew eggs from sites across the Yorkshire Dales that are likely to fail.

These nests are situated on or near footpaths where people and dogs will certainly cause the adults to abandon their nests. They are also taken from meadows that are due to be cut for silage or hay, and any site deemed unsuitable for a successful outcome.

These saved eggs are then taken to estates in the south where curlew are all but extinct as a breeding bird. They are then carefully incubated, hatched and reared and most importantly, protected from predators by gamekeepers.

Once the birds are strong enough and capable of flying away from most predators the birds are released into the wild. Last spring saw the first nesting attempt on the Duke’s Peppering Estate by one of the released curlew, there are exciting times ahead for a great project, which would fail if it wasn’t for the hard work carried out by a dedicated team in the north, and on the Peppering release site in the south.

Gamekeepers have always emphasised that conservation successes are down to careful habitat management together with an active predator control programme; whereas the RSPB has always played down this very point, opting to erect fences to keep foxes and badgers out. However, these do not have much success against stoats and avian predators.

The RSPB measures nesting success, not fledging success - a critical difference. It sounds really good when 8 out of 10 nests hatch; not so great when no chicks fledge due to predation.

The NGO believes it is now time that the RSPB comes clean to its members about predator control, but perhaps this is too expensive an exercise when it comes to membership? And it would also be a bitter pill to swallow for many of its members when it was the RSPB’s vice President, Chris Packham, who instigated a challenge on the General Licenses that so many land managers relied on to protect our vulnerable red- and amber-listed species like curlew. This act of self-sabotage has without doubt accelerated the decline of these enigmatic birds to an alarming rate.

Where were the RSPB when Packham and Wild Justice were attacking the very heart of the successful conservation on the ground, on the basis that it was funded by shooting?

This fool-hardy action sent out a message to the disciples of Packham and Wild Justice that predator control is bad, leaving many estates to focus this vital activity on areas not easily accessed by the general public, due to suffering thousands of pounds worth of damage of equipment.

And yet, with help from a government handout, the RSPB are running a programme to eradicate the stoat from the Orkney Islands. Costing upwards of £12million this project has achieved nothing like the successes that land managed for shooting has achieved (at no burden on the public purse). The NGO believes this “handout” represents a very poor return on their (your) investment.

This is only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when it comes to government handouts for failed conservation and rewilding projects. As Ian Coghill, lifelong conservationist and author of Moorland Matters, states, “Rewilding has become a belief, very nearly a religion, it is designed to avoid responsibility and in particular any form of predator control. As a result ground-nesting birds such as curlews are an inconvenience and have been quietly moved into a category of acceptable collateral damage”.

It is the NGO's view that the Government, and the general public, need to wake up, because the art of the ‘money grab’ practiced by many so-called conservation charities appears to come before the real conservation of wildlife and habitats.

ENDS

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