Wader Management. A Quick Overview

rhdr

Five years ago I became a Reserve Officer for the wildlife Trust, covering the Solent area. This primarily covered a coastal theme, specifically coastal grazing marsh. I had come from a background of woodlands and heaths, something still close to my heart. I was however taken under the spell of coastal management, especially wader and seabird management and I thought that I would write soemthing on this, covering what I have learned over the last half a decade of trial and error, research, criticisim and praise. It is, I believe, one of the most complex and intensive forms of management, almost wholy artificial in an environmenet no longer suitable to the birds that were once common throughout our countryside. Gone are the years of seeing lapwing and redshank in farmland and now are the times of eletric fences and heavily protected reserves. Something that must dramtically change. however, in the mean time, this is how we do it.

Waders, what they like.

Waders are birds we quite often think about in the winter, when our harbours on the south coast, and indeed across the country, fill with an array of species and this does indeed fill my thoughts through the autumn, making sure that the sites are in tip top condtion for the birds when they arrive. My obsession though has become breeding waders, in particualer lapwing, redshank and avocet, the birds that we get on our reserves and the more comon southern coast breeders. The process in getting the appropriate conditions is complicated as all birds like something a little different.

Lapwing like big open spaces. The better the view, the more likely they will settle down. This means no scrub, no long grass and especially no trees. Lapwing like to see their predators approaching from a long way off as their primary method of protection for their eggs and chicks is to divebomb potential threats, deterring them from an easy meal. They are excellent parents and do well in loose groups where the mobbing effect is greater. So the more lapwing you have, the greater the fledging rate is likely to be (though not always as I shall explain later). They will often nest on a small raised area for maximum visibilty, with their nests no more than a scrape in the ground.

Redshank like a slightly longer sward, with a mix of long and short areas. Their nests will be in a tussock of rush or long grass and rely a bit more on camouflage. They still prefer a more open landscape, so no scrub or trees. Rush pasture is ideal with tussock clumps dotted around at loose intervals.

Avocets, on our reserves at least, almost exclusively nest adjacent to water, needing open spaces and good areas of flooded pools and muddy margined water bodies. The chicks will feed on these exclusively unlike the other two species which will venture far into the middle of the marsh.

In all species there is a preferance for wet areas. Birds will breed near to these or bring their chicks to them once mobile. Lapwings will traverse a significant distance and multiple obstacles, dragging their chicks through hedgerows and over roads to get them to suitable foraging areas. Wet areas should be shallow to allow for the waders to walk around the edges but will require a depth suitable to hold water until at least July and the end of the key breeding time. It can last longer as all species will attempt up to three times if they fail at the egg stage initially, pushing the eventual fledging rate back until later in the summer.

Wet areas on nature reserves tend to come in the form of specific wader scrapes or shallow ditches or food drains that are either connected to waterbodies or can be filled artificially.

You tend to need a variety of areas not only to suite the nesting requierments of all the wader species but also their chicks foraging behaviour. This usually means splitting the reserve up into specific areas.

Once the chicks are mobile, ideally the habitat needed will be a mixture of either topographical or vegatative feautures allowing the chicks to hide when predators approach. This may be in the form of a varying sward height, tussock patches or hoof prints from cattle or the edge of a scrape that has been walked in.

In a farmland setting lapwing will nest in an arable field and once hatched will take their offspring perhaps several hundred metres into areas of grassland where they can then feed, often staying close to feautres like hedges that they once spurned during the nesting phase.

These are obviously over simplicfications and they are adaptable species. Like many species, they will not follow the text book example and you may find them in habitat that you would not expect. On the whole though, what I have described generally attrats these species.

The problems

predators, climate change, dryness, grass growth, trampling

There has been a great deal of work done on the dramatic decline of waders. Within the wider countryside intensive farming practices, especially over the key breeding time has contributed massively to the cataclysmic decline in these species. Across the board, waders have plummeted in their breeding range, they just don’t get enough chicks to survive to adulthood. The use of pesticides and the effect on the food source of these birds is also a huge contributer. For the populations to rise, this need ot be addressed and it needs to be addressed quickly. Within nature reserves though, this is not necessarily the case and the issues I shall be referring to are focused on areas of land, specifcally targeted for wader breeding.

Predators form one of the biggest threats to breeding wader populations, primarily foxes. They are very good at nest finding and you will find that certain individuals become more adept at it than others. If you have a fox like this on your site you may not produce many, if any, fledged young in a season.

The game and wildlfie conservancy did some very interesting work on gps tagging foxes. The range of movement within a population is huge and animals may travel large distances over the course of a night. If your site is right in the middle of the countryside, you may draw foxes in from a large radius. The issue that you have is that the reserves are indeed a draw as often they are great food resources for a range of predators.

Corvids are problematic as well. Crows, magpies and more recently ravens can be catrastrophic to your breeding birds. Crows are fantastic at finding nests and like foxes, you may get a pair that are particulalry good at it. They are mostly a threat at the egg stage and can often be seen sat on a fence post with a good overview, watching and working out where the nests are. All corvids are too clever for their own good! Ravens are a different kettle of fish as they are massive and will easily take a chick or two as a mouthful. I had a year at Farlington where we had almlost complete failure and mostly down to Ravens. There was rarely a time that I would go down and not see a raven with a lapwing chick.

Around April or the start of MLay, I will often get 30 plus crows on Farlington Marshes. It is always a worry but once a breeding pairs get establshed, these often disperse and you are left with one or two pairs that set up a nest. This is when you need to establish whether they are good nest finders or not. Good ones need to be taken care of, less compitent ones can be left.

Other avian predarors can be issues as well. Buzzards, red kites, peregrine falcons, large gulls can all have huge impacts on you colonies but are difficult to deal with without specic licences from Natural England. It is also something that we would not consider doing.

Predators are not the only issue though. Climate forms a major component in chick mortality. Periods of unseasonable cold weather in the spring can cause death through exposure. This is obviously out of the control of any site manager, however if the grass is long and wet and cold weather insues, the chicks will more likely die as they cannot dry out due to constanly becoming wet in the long grass. Chick down is not waterproof. This can happen in unseasably wet weaether as well for the same reasons. There is only so much time in which the adults can shelter fluffy and absorbant chicks.

What is more likely the issue nowadays is the opposite end of the spectrum, very hot and very dry springs. 2019 and 2020 have both seen extremely hot and arid condition from april onwards. 2021 seems to have followed suite partially as it has been very dry but contrary to other years, very cold. This dry weather means that the water bodies that require the prime foraging areas do not last into the breeding season. It also means that vegetation growth rockets and can easily get away from you if not careful, making conditions unsuitble for birds that wish to retry after a failed brood or for the current chicks.

The growth can be counteracted by the addition of grazing animals, usually cattle. This brings issues in itself through trampling. There is a high mortality rate at egg stage through trampling and stocking densities need to be kept low at the early stages. Preferably no livestock should be present early on. Once chicks appear, cattle can be introduced in low numbers. They do introduce a food source through their dung but significant enphasis should be made on the banning of invermectin wormers and preferably any wormers on site. This can often be a bone of contention with graziers and has to be delicatly traversed. Bringing animals on in late may, in low densities, is the best move as grass will soon get away from you in hot, wet weather.

Getting the habitat suitable is a battle every year as you are constantly working against a changing climate. One never knows what the year will throw at you any more. You may get arid conditions all summer, leaving a short sward but get a very wet and warm autumn, leaving the grass to go crazy just as you are drawing down cattle numbers. If the summer is wet and hot, you may struggle to get on top pof the grass growth with the number of livestock available to you.

Weeds can be a big problem in your sward. Given certain conditions or lack of management things like rush or creeping thistle can become abundant and make the sward less favourable to breeding waders as well as overwintering wildfowl. It is important to manage these at the approapriate times

Management processes

ehat aiming for, sward height, short areas around water bodies. ditching

The key for your summer management is to get a sward of suitable height ready for october and the end of the growing season. Generally the temperature drops below 10 degrees at this point and everything stops growing. This can often not be the case so you may need to adjust management to correspond. If you have geese on site, like we do on the south coast, the target length will be around 5cm which is nibble height for brent geese. Grazing is then continued through the winter by these birds, prducing a great sward, sometimes almost bowling green like.

Every year will require mechanicaly control, either of weeds or to manipulate sward length. This usually means by tractor and topping but may also be by handaround areas unsuitable for vehicles.

The cycle, a look at Farlington Marshes

Through the season this is how we manage Farlington Marshes to produce the conditions we need.

April cattle come on in low numbers. The grazier will be keen to get cows out so you have to manage that. I tend to stick them in areas where I know that there won’t be birds on nests. If you have had a very mild winter and early spring, grass growth may be going crazy, or if you did not achieve a short sward before winter you may have longer grass than desired. In this case a low density stocking will be necessary. I sometimes put on 15 or so cattle onto the main marsh at this time if needed. The main marsh is around 80 hectares so you can see it is quite low. Ideally we allow the cows to arrive in a seperate compartment, allow them a few days to calm down and see how skittish they are. Once calm, they are moved into the marsh where they are less likely to just charge around. Ideally older cattle are better as they are less excitable.

Stocking densities are kept low with cattle built up in areas where breeding birds are less likely. Come the end of May, the cattle numbers are increased, peaking around July when we have approximately 100 on the marsh and around 140 on site in total. This generally allows for adequat grazing across all areas to achieve the desired sward length for winter.

I’ve never found that grazing alone can do the best job. We have also sufffered from a huge quantity of creeping thistle in the past so mechanical control has always been necessary. About July / August we start topping. You want to top just as the thistle is coming into flower, that way it has used much of its stored reserves and will do a better job of suppressing it for the coming years. Given a very wet and warm summer you may need to top more than once.

The main use of topping in my mind, apart from the weed control, is to produce a short sward for autumn with fresh shoots just popping up at the end. So ideally in september, given good weather, a fresh growth of lovely green grass should be coming up at no more than a few centermeters length. Ideal for nibbling brent geese.

The key with topping is to allow some areas to remain un-topped. We leave a whole strip down the western edge of the marsh and patches throughout, hard topping the key feeding areas that we know the geese like. The un-topped areas remain slightly rougher and provide good habitat for young chicks to hide in. The longer areas also provide good cover for voles and other small mamamals and attract the foxes. It is therefore good to cultivate areas of long ranker grassland in areas away from the primary wader breeding sites which occupy foxes.The slightly longer areas, especially around the ditches and other water bodies allow suitable habitat for redshank and generally you find these on the periphery of the main marsh area, where we don’t top as intensively.

Once winter has arrived and the temperature drops, the sward stops growing. Hopefully at this point you have achieved the perfect height of 2 – 5cm. The geese then steadily build up, peaking around early January for Farlington. They then graze the marsh very heavily, along with other species such as widgeon. By March, this has generally resulted in a very short sward, providing an ideal nesting habitat for lapwing.

It is, in some ways, a perfect cycle where we provide a food source for one species which in turn provided the nesting requirements for another. It is never the same each year and stocking densities and topping regimes have to be constantly adapted. There is also the problem of time management for busy reserve teams who have more than one site to manage. Throw in global pandemics and other unforseen issues and you can easily get behind on management

Predator control – perching points, diversionary feeding active cotrol topping grazing etc.

Predator control is a key feature of any wader reserve. There are many options for all proplem species and many are not as palatable as others. It is highly important that you address the issues of predators though, as to fail to is to give little hope for any productivty. A single fox may work its way through all your nests in a couple of nights. Outlined are a few methods that have been adopted accross many reserves.

Foxes

Lethal control is the main option here. As mentioned, foxes are the primary reason for nest failure and as such need to be addressed. You can successfully control foxes by shooting them but in an open countryside landscape, you will pull foxes into the vacuum created which means, through the key breeding season you need to remain vigilant. On coastal sites, the reserve may be easier to protect with migration only avialable from a limited area, reducing the influx of foxes. This means that control can be undertaken pre breeding season and then fox numbers are low or non existant throug the key times.

More and more common now is the use of electric fencing or predator control fencing. The latter tends to be permanet and substantial, often dug in and angles at the top to dissuade foxes from clambering over. I have seen both options and both are effecteve, though labour intensive and costly. For areas where you know waders will breed year on year, lagoons with islands for example, predator fencing is a fantastic way to boost productivity and should be considered where financially possible.

In areas where waders breed in different spots year on years, mobile electic fencing is great. You have to make an eductated guess as to where you set it up but I have seen it used effectively on many reserves. It is cheaper and allows mobility in grazing as well. It is however extremely labour intensive to set up and take down, often requiring a few days and a number of people.

If you have breeding birds on islands in lagoons, fencing around the islands within the water can be highly effective. Foxes will not swim out and then climb over the fence.

As mentioned previously you can make areas of the site away from the breding areas more attractive to mammalian predators. Allowing ranker areas of grassland on the periphery of the site will attract small mammals and other food sources for foxes and keep them occupied there.

Avian Predators

Predation from the air is something much harder to deal with. You can’t net the whole area unfortuanetly, though I have seen attempts in the past to cover nests with cages for species such as godwits, with varying results.

Your main method here is to make predation as difficult as possible. Remove all perching points around your breeding areas. This may be small shrubs or trees. We manage all out hedge rows around the perephery of the marsh area at Farlington to about waste to chest height. This retains breeding habitat for species such a linnets but does not give an elevated position for crows to perch. Fences are also issues so we place a six inch nail into the tops of every post, stopping a large bird from landing on them.

One of the most effective stategies that I have adopted is that of diversionary feeding. We have a table approximately six foot off the ground that we place bait on. This often comes in the form of dead squirrels but we have also used deer and other road kill that we find. I have also used day old chicks in the past that ravens scoop up three at a time! I also disperse chicken eggs around the site in large quantities. This all seems to keep the problemetaic avian predators such as ravens at bay. I have watched a raven fly straight over some very plump lapwing chicks and head for the dead squirrel, much easier than being mobbed by angry lapwing parents.

It isn’t full proof though. You have to be aware that you may pull in more predators this way. I have seen an increase in larger gulls this year where we have been intensively feeding. Lesser black backed and herring gulls are around more which could cause issues if they get bored of squirrel. They are however occuppied for the time being and therefore it seems to be working. Certain;y somethng that must be carefully monitored.

You can use lethal control on species such as crows and magpies, though this now needs to be licenced. It is not a route that I have gone down due to the labour intesity of it and the issue with causing a vacuum. Once a breeding pair is removed, you may get many more younger birds arrive which could be more problematic.

All the others

There are a whole multitude of predators that could cause you a head ache. Hedgehogs, weasels, stoats, badgers, dogs are all predators of eggs. There is a point where you cannot really help so you just have to keep your fingers crossed.

The future

it may all seem a bit over the top but as mentioend before, if you do not go to these lengths then you are unlikely to produce many young and this is currently the key to wader recovery in the UK. More chicks are needed and more of these need to reach adulthood.

Currently this seems most likely in reserves like Farlington Marshes where land managers can work hard to get good productivity and so many teams are doing a great job. The RSPB, Hampshire County Council and Natural England are all doing fantastic work locally, knocking out chicks every year. We know how to do it and we’re all getting pretty good at it.

These reserves have a finite amount of space and we need to start thinking about where the next generations of these birds will go. It is no good prducing them but future adult birds then spreding out and failing to produce young. Local work must therefore be undertaken with farmers and land owners to produce suitable conditions for waders to thrive. This may be the addition of wet areas or just simply the change in timings of certain practices. Joining areas will be key and hopefully we can change the tide of waders in the UK. We are on the cusp, with seed sources available, we just need a push to identify areas to make a little space.

April Showers?

Farlington Marshes

The lack of April showers have left the ground dry and the grass short, neither of which are good features of a grazing marsh. ‘The Deeps’ at the Southern end of the reserve act as a reservoir, and with the opening and closing of several control structures we can keep the interior ditches as wet as we need them…but even the reservoir dries out eventually.

Our breeding waders on site have been busy pairing up and settling down. Some of our Lapwing already have chicks with them, and a few others are on nests. The food for these waders are the many invertebrates that live under the surface and thrive in areas of wet soil, which makes it essential to keep the ground saturated at such an important time of year.

Lapwing Chick – April 2021

Around the perimeter of the site are several deep ditches of little importance, and until now they have not been fully utilised. We have made a small investment and bought a generator powered water pump which can shift 550 litres of water a minute. Along with some considerable lengths of hose, we can move this water from the unused perimeter ditches into the small scrapes and ditches throughout the marsh where our breeding waders spend the majority of their time.

Pump it!

Keeping the ground saturated is important for the chicks; rather than the parents bringing them food, the chicks will be probing the ground for themselves, looking for those tasty invertebrates to keep them growing. This is obviously easier for them and their short beaks in spongey, wet ground rather than hard, dried soil. We will be keeping a close eye on their success.

Strange ladies with a wheelbarrow!

We often get approached by people to undertake projects on our sites. These can range from surveys and updating knoweledge on certain species to filming scenes from a viking invasion (that actually got requested). This blog covers a very interesting project about something that I had no idea existed.

Strange ladies with a wheelbarrow!

Emma Karoune

If you have been down to Farlington Marshes over the last month, you might have seen me and my helpers (Siggy Osbourne, a final year undergraduate student, and Sarah Elliot, a postdoctoral researcher, both from Bournemouth University) walking around with a wheelbarrow, sitting on the ground examining the plants or even bagging up soil samples. 

You have probably been thinking, what are they up to?

Who I am and what I am doing?

I’m an archaeobotanist. This means I’m a scientist that specializes in examining plant remains from archaeological sites. I look at microscopic plant remains called phytoliths. These are silica shapes formed in living plant cells and they preserve in soils for thousands of years. I am developing a new method that can be used to find out about environmental changes in the past and what types of plants past humans exploited in Britain.

Before I can examine ancient remains, I have to understand how to recognise modern plants. So I am currently making a reference collection of southern coastal plant communities, in collaboration with Historic England, and I’m trying to work out what these look like when the phytoliths end up in the soil.  

This picture shows what phytoliths look like 

under a microscope when they are separated from soils.

What I’m doing at Farlington Marshes?

As well as being an important site for bird life, Farlington Marshes has some interesting plant communities including a saltmarsh, a grazing marsh, reed beds and grasslands. I have been taking samples of the different plant species found in each of the areas and I will use these plants to find out if they have unique phytoliths that can be used to identify the plants. I am also making herbarium samples that will be stored at Portsmouth Museum for other researchers to use.

The other method I am using is to sample using a quadrat. This is a 1m by 1m square that is used to take a standard size sample. In each quadrat, I have taken the plants found above-ground and samples of the topsoil below the plants. I will then look at the differences between the phytoliths found in the plants and the soil. This will help me to work out what is lost through wind and water movement and it also provides a reference to identify each plant community that can be used to identify past landscapes.

Taking soil samples from a quadrat in the lower salt marsh area at Farlington Marshes.

What happens to the plants and soils once they are taken from Farlington Marshes?

I start by taking photos of each type of plant, including using a microscope to look at certain parts that help with identification. As I am making a reference collection, I have to be sure that I am identifying the plants correctly so all my identifications are being checked by expert botanists from the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI). Most plants have unique flowering parts and grasses and sedges can be identified using the parts where the leaf meets the leaf stalk (called the ligule and auricles).

I have to dry the plants and soils to help preserve them. I do this by laying out the plants on newspaper and stacking them up with more newspaper and corrugated cardboard. It takes a few days to a week to dry the plants. They are then put into plastic sample bags and taken to the laboratory at Fort cumberland, Portsmouth – these are the scientific laboratories for Historic England.

To extract phytoliths from plants, each plant is burnt in a laboratory furnace at 500^oC for several hours until there is only a white ash. What is left is the phytoliths and they will be permanently mounted on to a microscope slide. Each slide will then be examined to work out if they have phytoliths that help to identify each specific plant. The slides will be part of a permanent reference collection kept at Fort Cumberland and will be accessible to other researchers. The reference collection will also be photographed for a free to access digital resource. 

Once I have worked out how to recognise the differences between each plant community, I can then start to use this new method on archaeological sites. This research has the potential to add to our knowledge of past plant use and long-term landscape changes in Britain. 

I would like to thank Chris Lycett for helping me access Farlington Marshes. This research is supported by small research grants from the Association Environmental Archaeology and the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland.

The mad rush

February is always a busy time for us. Winter is ‘go time’ when you work in conservation. A time to get all your work done that is needed before the nesting birds return. You tend to be fairly relaxed pre-Christmas and into January which means February is mad panic to get everything done. We are however almost there, following quite an ambitious programme of works across all our sites but especially at Farlington Marshes.

It’s fairly obvious to see where we’ve been working at the moment. The track north to the underpass is littered with brash, as are certain parts of the surrounding fields. We’ve had the ongoing problem all winter where we have had no northerly winds and being that close to the motorway means that we can’t burn unless we do.

So what have done and why the dramatic change? We’ve been working on the north eastern corner of the reserve for a while. The gradual change to reed bed has been reversed and the result was five breeding pairs of lapwing last year. Subsequently we have made more improvements to hopefully boost that numbers. The main task this winter was to reduce the surrounding hedges. High hedges mean great vantage points for predatory birds such as crows. The hedges in this particular section have been long over stood and are all a tangled mass of blackthorn and bramble all up in the canopy meaning that a lot of the understorey was dead and hollowed out so actually quite poor for breeding passerines. I found one old nest in the whole 200m section of hedge we cut.

We didn’t just cut it down. Hedges are integral for the site, with many species using them to feed and nest in. We laid it, keeping it attached at the bottom so it would grow. This not only reduces the height and those perching points, it opens up the entire area, improving site and flight lines for our waders and wildfowl. It also thickens up the hedge, producing a much better breeding habitat for things like dunnock, robins and other small song birds.

You may have noticed that we have removed some of the large cracked willows from behind the building as well. Due to salt water incursion across the site, these have steadily died and keep falling through our fence line. The worry is that they would fall onto the cattle as well, who like standing underneath them. We’ve left any with signs of life but they’re all looking ropey. however, willows being willows, they should respond well to the pollarding and will hopefully do better from a quick trim. It has had the benefit  of opening the site up and Mudlands, the field in front of it, will hopefully do well from this.

I’m excited by Mudlands. we’ve had no records of breeding waders here for a number of years and after a lot of scrub and rush removal, it is now looking particularly good for redshank.

The plan for the rest of February is to work over the north side of the motorway, removing the scrub that the has encroached into the fields.

 

High Tides and hedge laying

12000 dunlin just off the point. 5500 of these were roosting on the marsh

Farlington has been brilliant over the lastfew weeks. Several very large tides mixed with a tidal surge meant that on several occasions the islands in the harbour have gone fully underwater. This means that the waders and wildfowl that normally roost there have to go somewhere else. This is when Farlington comes into its own. Whilst doing the webs count on Saturday we came across 5500 dunlin roosting on the banks of The Deeps. In my three and a half years working on site, this is something that I have not seen before and its occurred several times recently.

Interestingly, historically many of the harbours waders roosted in the marsh rather than the islands and at some point in the past there was a shift and they now prefer the islands. Given the state of our futures climate, sea level rise and more common storms, seeing waders on the marsh in large numbers is likely to be a much more common site (until it gets so high it comes over the walls!).

Brents have just started to come onto the fields in large numbers. We had just over a thousand on Saturday, spread through most of the marsh though tending to favour the top end. We are doing a juvenile count across the harbours on Thursday so it will be interesting to start seeing what is happening this year. Overall again, there seems to be less numbers in the area. Whether the birds are not venturing as far due to the weather or even heading to France, we are not entirely sure at the moment.

Mudlands looking in great condition

Work wise, we have been very busy at Farlington. We have finished tackling some bramble encroachment into an area of site called Mudlands. This has a lot of potential but has scrubbed over and become quite rush dominated over the years. We have spent a couple of summers beating the rush back and a couple of winters fighting the bramble. We’re now at the stage where I am very hopeful for breeding waders, especially redshank.

The last piece of the puzzle has been the hedges around the periphery of this area. It looks like it was planted about 20 years ago with the intention of laying but nobody ever got around to it. It is mostly blackthorn and bramble, the latter has climbed into the canopy and blocked the light to the lower sections. What is left is a dead and decaying hedgeline, with limited nesting possibilities. We have started laying it and this will allow the hedge to thicken up. It also lowers the whole area, bringing down any possible crow perching points or nesting points where they can sit and watch out for little lapwing chicks. Given a couple of summers, it will thicken up and we shall allow it to expand outwards, proving great habitat for species like whitethroat.

Opening up this area will hopefully pack in more breeding waders, possibly expanding our total numbers well beyond our record breeding pairs. The volunteers have done a fantastic job, tackling some very complicated tasks.

An Excellent Spring

Farlington Marshes is an incredibly important site for waders and wildfowl within the local area. A lot of the focus on the site is in winter when thousands of birds descend on the site and feed, roost and bathe in the range of habitats that are there. If you take advantage of the site on a big spring tide, like the ones that we have just had when all the islands in the harbour are reduced to small spits of land, you will be treated to thousands of roosting dunlin, redhank and oyster cathers. With climate change, rising sea levels will see this as a much more regular feature.

What is often overlooked at Farlington is the spring and summer visitors. The site plays host to many species of breeding birds and arguably the most important are its breeding waders. This primarily constitutes lapwing, redshank and avocet, the latter being a very recent development for the reserve.

Lapwing

These are the main focus for the site in the spring. One of the first birds to breed, they desire a short, cropped sward so they can look out for predators. Our grazing regime through the summer, followed by a couple of thousand brent geese in the winter allow for perfect conditions by March for this species to call Farlington home.

Unfortunately, as in many of our ground nesting wader species, lapwing have seen a dramatic decline in the past couple of decades. Nationally, lapwing breeding populations have declined by 53% (according to the BTO BBS data). We have seen this at Farlington with pairs traditionally at around 30 pairs in the 80’s with more recent numbers around 15. There just aren’t many around. We have sites further inland which are perfect for breeding lapwing but just don’t have them. It poses a serious problem across the UK. We have good sites that can be utilised by waders but they are quite site faithful and tend to go where other waders go, therefore attracting them to new, safer sites which don’t already have lapwing is a significant hurdle that we need to address.

Redshank

This species has seen similar decline of 29% in wet meadows across the UK. These have a slightly different need to the lapwing, in terms of nesting habitat. They like a bit of a rougher sward, with tussocks that they can tuck their nests into. At Farlington this is often around the peripheries of the site where the cattle don’t graze as thoroughly, or in the rougher areas where we do not mow.

Avocet

This species has seen an increase in the last couple of decades, rising in numbers after a huge crash. Farlington has only played host to them for the last three years, where the population has grown each year. They nest in a similar habitat to Lapwing, in very open country and associated to water.

All these species are ground nesting making them very vulnerable to predation, both from the ground and the air. Even once they’ve hatched, the chicks are small fluffy snacks for a range of predators so survivability is very low. The main strategy for the parents is to mob any potential predator and this they do exceptionally well. Avocets in particular are extremely aggressive, seeing off crows and even buzzards by swooping down on them. They tend to nest in loose colonies so the effect is accentuated and can be very effective.

The problem in the current era of development and intensive farming is that many of these species are confined to small areas of land, especially nature reserves. This crush of breeding birds is a veritable buffet for a host of ever expanding predators. Farlington has foxes, crow, magpies, jackdaws, weasel, hedgehogs, buzzards, all of which can find eggs or pluck a chick without a problem. Recently ravens have become the biggest threat. Beefy and smart, they have no problem finding nests or gobbling chicks up until a late stage in their development. In 2018 I watched a pair of ravens take every single lapwing chick on the marsh over a few weeks. I watched crows the year before take many of the avocet eggs. All in all the odds are stacked against them. They are however long lived birds, so just one good year in the few means the difference between a declining and an increasing population. Several good years means a significant boost.

2019 at Farlington saw hopefully the first good year at Farlington in a while. In fact it was the best year in terms of breeding waders in the last 20 years. This has been a result of a lot of intensive management and probably quite a heavy dose of good luck.

What we did

Starting in the winter of 2018/2019 we did some quite dramatic habitat management works around the main breeding areas on site. We removed all the scrub with in the marsh and some around the boundaries. What was left in the peripheries we reduced down to fence height. the immediate effect of doing this meant we had brent geese feeding right up next to the fence line which we hadn’t had in previous years. The intention was to make it more attractive to breeding waders. Generally these species do not like areas in which they don’t have a clear view. If there is a big old bramble bush in the way, then they will be deterred. However, we don’t want to lose our hedges as they provide a home for species such as linnets therefore we now maintain them at a much lower level, about 1.8m. This allows space for more species. We also lay many of our overstood hedges to create better nesting habitat for small passerines and eliminate the nesting habitat and perching posts for corvids.

We also cut a large area of reed that had occurred due to a leak in the sea wall, causing the site to become wetter over the years. The 2.5 hectares of reed that had developed meant that this part of the site which historically was very good for lapwing, was no longer suitable. we therefore cut if back. This was a significant undertaking and took us almost a whole month of volunteer tasks.

Once we got into the breeding season we started a series of predator controls. we put nails into fence posts to prevent species like crows perching on them. This was mainly around keys breeding areas. These viewpoints allowed crows to sit and watch and being clever little things, they could easily work out where the nests were.

Our main solution to predation was diversionary feeding. The ravens were a particular problem so we set up a series of large bird tables where we put out eggs and road kill as regularly as we could. They were particularly keen on day old chicks, the kind that you feed your pet snake. I have footage of a raven taking three at a time!

By a stroke of luck many of the black headed gulls that nest out on the harbours islands were disturbed early in the season. About 70 odd packed up and moved onto Farlington, something that we have never had in such numbers. Luckily we had done some management works the previous year to entice terns (which we did) and so the islands on the lakes were a perfect alternative. The combined effect of all these gulls, the lapwing and the avocet meant that any predatory bird that flew over had a significantly hard time getting any where near the nests. Even the ravens were a bit put off!

Realistically the conditions were very poor across the marsh for breeding waders that spring. We had quite a dry winter followed by an incredibly dry spring and summer. There was less water at the end of winter within The Deeps than I have ever seen. This is important as it is our reservoir for feeding the rest of the sites ditches and allowing the wet areas needed for the chicks to feed in. This saw many of the chicks being moved quite some distance. In one case the chicks made it all the way through the reedbed onto  the lake, where they did very well. Adult lapwing move their chicks some way in order to find them the damp conditions that they need.

We had to very carefully monitor our water levels over that spring to maintain the conditions needed without lowering the water levels too much in The Deeps and exposing the nesting islands to predation from foxes. It was quite a tightrope but we managed it.

One of my more pleasing solutions to the arid conditions was the use of a solar powered pond water fountain. It could be put on a timer in the surrounding ditch line and for three hours every day it pumped water into a wet flush on the edge of the reserve where a couple of lapwing pairs had young. It worked surprisingly well for £60.

Results

As I have mentioned, 2019 was the best year in terms of breeding waders within the last 20 years. The last good year was 2010 and we had better numbers than that. Lapwing looked to be around 36 pairs, redshank in the early teens and the same with avocet. We’re just awaiting the exact data but I can say with confidence that not only did we have good breeding numbers, more importantly we had an excellent fledgling rate.

I took the tractor on the marsh from the building to the scrape (for some reason you can drive straight up to the birds in the tractor and they don’t mind, the don’t like the truck though). I counted 7 lapwing chicks within that 200 meters. That’s a fantastic amount.

The avocets were the only casualty. The islands that they and some of the gulls were nesting on were raided by a fox, only three chicks fledged. We have since fenced these islands and so hope for better numbers next year.

So, why are we so happy about this? Well its obviously good to see chicks survive and as mentioned these species only need a good few years occasionally. We havn’t had a good year for at least 9 years and that is one in a much longer time. It is a step in the right direction for us, we have new processes in place to cope with the new conditions that we find ourselves in within a very urban south Hampshire. I feel confident that going forward, we can start boosting the local population and when you look at Farlington within the local landscape, it is a good place for these birds to then spread east to Hayling and Thorney island where there is potential habitat and north towards the South Downs. We hope to work with other organisations to coordinate wader management within these areas to make sure that we can see these birds in years to come.

Going forward

We have already started our next round of works to improve the nesting potential. I’m confident that 36 pairs can increase  significantly as there is plenty of space, we just need to open it up. Before autumn I had a digger come in and repair some of our weirs and grade some of our ditches which had become steep sided over the years and less suitable for waders. We also cleared some ditches to allow the flow of water off the areas flooded by sea water. This will help us wit the reed control.

Recently we have worked hard on the northern fields, reverting them from scrub and thick rush with giant boundary hedges to a patchy mosaic of short and long swards, with low, dense boundary hedges that will hide people but provide nesting habitat for our small passerines. I am very pleased with the work as, though it may look dramatic at the moment, the potential here to provide homes for so many more species is great. Currently I am very hopeful for some redshank nesting within one of the fields, something that I have never witnessed.

Over the next few years we shall look more intensely at predator management and whether we need to start putting in electric fencing for this. We shall also be looking at creating more standing water and wet flushes within the spring through new ditch works.

Its all very exciting and I am very hopeful for the next few years.

 

cutting and collecting

We’ve been busy lately starting the summer works at Farlington. This mainly involves cutting things and raking them up and removing it. Its hot, arduous work for the volunteers and gets hotter and more arduous throughout the summer.

We’ve started in the field north of the building. Our aim here is to suppress the rush that has started to dominate there over the years. Due to a breach in the sea wall, it is wetter in this part of the reserve, providing optimum conditions for rush to take over. We therefore have to cut it quite early and then I’ll have to top it all again with the tractor later on, steadily wearing it down. The aim is to produce a sward that is structurally less dense and shorter but also providing more palatable plants to the cattle and ultimately to our overwintering wildfowl. This will in turn keep it short for the waders to nest in for the spring. After some work last year the front end of this part of the site provided a safe haven for two lapwing chicks and a few redshank which have all fledged.

Our next job will be out on the marsh, topping the creeping thistle. This is a big job every year but every year that we do it intensely, the next year is a little bit better. Again this reduces the unpalatable plants and allows that short grassland that the wildfowl love. Its always a tricky balance between getting the optimum time (just before the thistle flowers) and trying to avoid the bulk of the nesting birds. Most of the waders are up and running now so this should not be a problem. There are a few on nest, (Oyster Catcher which have successfully bread, possibly for the first time on the marsh) but these are quite obvious. Strangely, none of the waders are the slightest bit bothered by the tractor so I can drive right up to them.

My main concern is for species such as skylark and meadow pipit which will still be nesting. Many will be on second or even third broods by now. The key to avoiding these is to keep the topper high enough to bounce over any nests. In the end the topping benefits more species than if we didn’t do it so as long as the greatest of care is taken it can be quite a small impact.

Our other big cut and collect job this year will be in the Hayfield where we have seen a huge invasion of reed. We cut it in the winter so as nothing nested in it over spring. As soon as it flowers we shall be cutting it again. This will hopefully suppress it over the years and return this part of the site to grassland. The cut this winter provided habitat for 6 pairs of lapwing so I am very happy with the direction of this.

Strangely the islands on the scrape that were occupied by black headed gulls and avocets the other week have all abandoned. I assume that this was predation event, probably by a fox. This is a shame as we could have got our best ever number of avocets to breed. Unfortunately we are left with three avocet chick, which seem to be doing well so I guess that’s better than nothing.

 

Wader Farming

Given the current focus on rewilding or wilding or whatever form yo prescribe to, I think that it is important to address this in terms of what many of us do in conservation and how this works wonderfully in some respects and could be detrimental in others.

I’m a huge fan of rewilding and Knepp, in my humble opinion, is a wonderful place and an example of what can be done in many situations around the UK. In contrast, my work is very far removed from what happens at Knepp. Farlington is an extreme example of the other end of conservation. It is in essence completely artificial, being reclaimed from the harbour in the 1700’s and for most of its existence, intensively farmed. In fact now it is basically an intensively farmed landscape. I have up to 150 cows on there grazing over the key summer months, stemming the tide of grow in the grassland and maintaining optimum conditions for many of  our key species. There is a lot of intervention work carried out by machinery and tractor and we control undesirables for the betterment of certain species. Not very wildy.

Intensive farming immediately conjures up the image of the arable deserts and over grazed pastures that you see across much of the country. Farlington however is booming with life. When I go out onto the marsh in summer, there are skylarks and meadow pipits galore, nesting within the longer tussocks. Common blues and small heath butterflies are more abundant than on some of the well known butterfly spots in the county. This is more down to us not employing many of the damaging practices in farming that are now commonplace. No chemicals are every used at Farlington (the farmer who owns the cows worms them occasionally but we try to minimize this and use safer products). It is possibly a bit more like farming pre-intensification after world war two.

Of course what it is about for us is the spring breeding waders and the overwintering wildfowl and what they like is something not necessarily produced by natural processes within the confines of Langstone Harbour. Perhaps once, in a free flowing coastal environment, suitably grazed salt marsh and coastal grazing marsh would have existed in suitable quantities to support lapwing and avocet, in fact it must have. Look at Oostervanderplasn in the Netherlands. Perfect habitat. Perhaps natural levels of these species were always quite low anyway. We can’t ever know. What I do know though is if we don’t intensively manage farlington, these species will be lost from Langstone harbour and eventually from  a lot of south Hampshire. My colleagues locally in Natural England, Hampshire County Council and the RSPB all so similar work on a number of key nature reserves.

Wader conservation is hugely intensive and is essentially wader farming. We’re doing our best to rear as many waders as possible, through whatever means necessary. It isn’t just the grazing that is intensive. We have to attack scrub with vigor. Every winter we take out more in the key areas. Last years work paid off with our best ever wader year. This winter we shall take out more and hopefully see another rise. In my opinion we must optimise every part of Farlington to maintain the highest possible population of these species, that way recruitment into the wider population is more effective and will go to bolster surrounding populations and hopefully we can see an increase overall.

This spring has been so dry that I have had to install pumps in some of the ditch lines to maintain pools for the lapwing chicks to feed on. Otherwise they would all congregate on the more open lakes and get predated. I have installed predator fencing around the islands in the deeps, this has been very successful and I will role this out across the site this winter. We’ve improved some of the islands as well and the avocets have taken to them happily. We’ve put huge efforts into distracting corvids, especially the ravens,. There is a lot going on just to produce a few chicks and this year is the first year in a while that it has all come together. Between the building and the scrape I counted 7 fully fledged lapwing chicks on Friday. Very good numbers.

We could let natural processes take over Farlington. I suppose that we’d end up with scrub patches within a mostly rank field  and this would benefit a number of species. Perhaps all the scrub warblers would rocket in their population here. This would be severely detrimental to the breeding wader populations within the area. This year Farlington has probably been one of, if not the best, breeding sites for lapwing along the south coast of Hampshire. By taking a step to rewild it we would be choosing other species over the current species and given the nature of south Hampshire’s coast, there is no place to replicate Farlington, especially if it were left to natural processes.

Seabirds

Farlington marshes in the spring is a place for breeding waders and some wildfowl species. As the previous blog post suggested, lapwing, redshank and avocet fill my attention for the spring period and this year is looking to be a very good year.

Last autumn and the previous spring we did did some projects around the site and on a few others to start looking at what we can do to assist in the breeding success of some seabirds within Langstone Harbour. Gulls and terns of a variety of species call the harbour home and due to sea level rise and disturbance, lack of space and development pressure, seabirds are suffering  in terms of breeding and productivity (producing enough young to sustain the population). 

The harbours islands, managed successfully by the RSPB, have always been the bastion of seabird success in Langstone but in recent years, with a burgeoning Mediterranean gull population and pressures from freak storms and sea level rise, the populations of some of these birds have shown some decline, especially the tern species. Little terns, species of ephemeral, quite often tidal, habitats have suffered the most.

Rafts seem to be the answer. We have helped launch the RSPB raft on the Oyster Beds for many years now and each years it astounds me at how successful it is. So last spring and autumn we did some improvements to The Deeps on Farlington, placing shingle on an island and predator fencing them so foxes couldn’t get on. We also placed a raised pontoon in the middle of the lake. The result has been an influx of nesting black headed gulls which have had wide ranging benefits in predator deterrence, helping out our other breeding species.

As of last week we can add another new breeding species for the reserve. A common tern pair has nested on our raised pontoon within the deeps. I know this is just one but I am hoping that this is just the start of a colony that can be established in the relative safety of Farlington Marshes, protected from tidal surges and to a large extent, predators. It could of course just be a fluke from a very strange year for breeding seabirds in the harbour.

A Good Start

We’re well through Spring now and everything is settling down at Farlington marshes. We have most of our migrants in but some are still funneling through. We have sedge and reed warblers in the reedbeds and scrub areas. There seems to be a whitethroat inhabiting every available bush and hedge and the bearded tits are nesting and well on their way.

My main concern over the Spring period at Farlington is always our breeding waders. In decline across the country, they are an important component to our reserve and one that needs a lot of attention. Lapwing and redshank in particular are key at Farlington and since 2017 avocet as well. There is an intense period of worry for me through March, April and into May and this can last up into June depending on what happens in the breeding season.

Lapwing are one of my favourite birds but their nesting strategy could be seen as somewhat ambitious. They like to nest in short grassland with a good view out, quite often on a small raised area. This allows them to scan for predators such as foxes and crows. They then aggressively mob any predators that come near them and, hopefully, scare them off. This strategy works best when several birds nest in a loose colony or are around other birds that exhibit similar behaviour.

I wasn’t sure how this year would go. The last few years have seen around the 12-15 mark on breeding pairs. 2010 was a bumper year with 32 pairs but has seen a decline since and evened out at about half that. Last year produced no chicks due to heavy predation rates from a pair of ravens that had set up home. There were also more crows around since the loss of a dominant pair. So I was not entirely sure how things would pan out, the ravens were still around in March and we had more crows than I have ever seen. On the other hand, we had done some significant management works over the winter, opening up the site with a lot of scrub management around the periphery of the site. The grassland was very short after a hot dry summer and grazing from the geese over the winter. There have been negatives and positives and realistically with conservation, there are so many outside pressures on these birds, it really is anybodies guess as to what will happen. I was happy with the condition of the site and I had a plan to deal with the predation issues, time has taught me though not to get optimistic.

The ravens constitute a significant threat to our birds at Farlington. I watched the pair last year take several lapwing chicks, ignoring any mobbing behaviour from the adults. It was quite heart breaking. It is great that ravens are doing well in the UK again. Once a common bird across the county their decline is a sad one but their return is not without its issues. The modern landscape of pockets of productivity on nature reserves and no spreading space for these species means that entire colonies can be wiped out very quickly, having long lasting  impacts. They are long lived birds however so a good year every few years is enough to keep the population going. The dramatic decline over the last fifty years is however suggesting that this is not happening at all. What can you do about this predation? Not a lot really in terms of management. You can’t shoot ravens, quite rightly. You can’t currently shoot crows. The option that we have left is to distract them. I have been feeding the ravens regularly at points across the reserve. A mixture of eggs and day old chicks (the kind you feed to pet snakes) has seemed to work for now.

I am pleased to say that this year looks to be very good. In fact it looks to be the best year in a decade for breeding waders at Farlington. It looks like we’re in the mid thirties for pairs of lapwing and we already have a number of chicks running around. I am very enthused by the number of pairs that have inhabited and area that we have restored to the rear of the site. It had been engulfed by reed and the plan was to restore it to suitable lapwing nesting habitat. I assumed it would take a few years for them to adopt the site but it has happened immediately. The good thing here is that the reed is regrowing and the chicks a extremely well covered so they stand a good chance of survival.

Another area in which they are doing well is a n area we have reclaimed from a significant rush invasion. Rush had swamped the area and made it unsuitable for waders. A number of tasks from the volunteers over a few years has seen a great change in this area and breeding lapwing again.

In fact the lapwing have spread out across thee entire site, even occupying the northern end of the main marsh which they haven’t done in quite some time. I believe that this is a result of the scrub management around the edges that we did over winter. There have also been other factors that have affected this flush of chicks. Black headed gulls seem to have set up residence on the marsh, in two small colonies. these have significantly added to the mobbing effect when crows go over, adding additional protection. The avocets seem to be in their highest numbers ever. These are exceptionally aggressive parents so will help greatly.

All in all it is currently looking rather good and I hope for a productive year in terms of breeding waders. There is, however, still a very long way to go. A big thanks goes out to all the wardens and surveyors who are helping me monitor the situation this year and help feed the ravens. It seems to be paying off so far.