The UK Lowland Curlew Recovery Project Aims
- To recover the nationally significant curlew population in the Shropshire Hills and Welsh Marches, increasing range with funding and to meet demand.
- Establish a sustainable lowland curlew population in the medium to long term.
- Work with partners to establish a strategy for UK Curlew Recovery.
- Establish a workable model for every farmer with curlew on their land, to achieve breeding success.
- Prove that the additional environmental benefits that will be achieved through managing for waders will deliver public goods at a reasonable cost.
- Raise awareness of curlew needs among land managers (farmers, contractors, shoots, fox controllers and others) and deliver training where appropriate.
- Influence policy makers to provide adequate outcomes-based support for land managers supporting breeding waders.
- Work with other curlew groups outside moorland and upland areas to achieve similar sustainability for UK curlew populations.
What is needed now:
Government help for farmers supporting breeding curlew and delivering a range of other environmental benefits through doing so.- Funding for predation control.
- Saving the curlew population from extinction in the short-term through headstarting.
- Research into longer term curlew population sustainability
What has been achieved since the Curlew Country Project began in 2014:
2014 – Planning
Curlew Country was originally one of 15 projects that formed the Heritage Lottery funded, Stiperstones and Corndon Landscape Partnership Scheme (LPS).
The project designed for the LPS was about advising farmers on habitat management to improve success of breeding curlew. Initial findings were that the original project design was unwelcome to farmers. They did not like the ‘top down’ approach and suggested that it was pointless doing anything about habitat management until predation control was taken seriously. The farmers indicated that they were very keen to work with the ‘right’ people to support ground-nesting birds.
A Project Advisory Group was set up to advise on technical issues and to help plan nest monitoring work on the ground. Curlew Country asked farmers and land managers to become partners in the project and to help it discover the true causes of nest failure through nest monitoring.
Funds were raised to employ an ornithologist, buy nest cameras and data loggers.
You can find each years nest monitoring reports here.