Breeding waders are declining throughout the UK but their presence will enormously enrich the pleasure of managing a shoot. ROBIN MARSHALL-BALL explains what you can do to encourage them.

Does any portion of your shoot lie on either coastal or river flood plain? If so, you may be able to encourage breeding waders to make their homes on your ground. Work days in late spring and early summer will be all the more pleasurable if your efforts are accompanied by the haunting cry of a curlew, the tumbling display flight of a lapwing, the unearthly drumming sound of a snipe, or the fluid piping of a redshank from his perch on a nearby fence post.

These four native species need all the help we can give them. Land drainage, changes in farming methods, and even the use of agrochemicals, have all contributed to the alarmingly rapid decline in their breeding numbers throughout the British Isles. This loss has been most noticeable on lowland wet grassland. On the Somerset Levels, for example, lapwing numbers have dropped by 58% in the last 20 years or so, to probably less than a hundred breeding pairs, and the other species show a similar decline.

Is your shoot suitable for waders?

Firstly, you need to decide if your ground is suitable. Ask yourself:

• Do the fields ‘lie wet’ between early March to late May? Do they have more than five per cent standing shallow water, along a ditch side or in a wet corner? Don’t forget that five per cent is only a very small proportion of your total field area.
• Alternatively, is the land ‘soft’– can you push a six-inch nail easily into the ground on more than ten per cent of the field? If you can, then a snipe or curlew will find foraging with their long bills easy!
• Are your fields bounded by at least one wet ditch which can be managed to control the water levels?

If you can answer yes to these questions, then your ground has the potential for helping to halt the decline!

WHAT WADERS NEED

A study of the nesting habits for each species seems to show slight differences in their preferred sites, so whatever ground you have, you can probably make it more attractive to one or more species.

LAPWING

Like to make their nests on open ground. Many of the remaining Somerset Levels nest sites are on arable land – spring-sown grain crops give them adequate cover for the chicks – but many attempts on maize cover crops and fodder fields fail because the crops just grow too quickly! On wet pasture land, they prefer a short-cropped sward, so the land needs to be cattle-grazed well into the winter. 

SNIPE

Like to nest in tussocky, wet pasture. A field well-dotted with soft rush and sedges will attract them – they nest in the dense cover of the tussocks but need escape routes over the more open pasture.

REDSHANK

Look for fields where the tussocks are more closely packed and taller, though they still need escape routes between the tussocks – a dense rush-covered field or reedbed would prevent this.  

CURLEW

These have different preferences. On the Levels a favoured nesting site is hay meadows, providing the crop is not used for silage, which is cut while the chicks are still very vulnerable. As for feeding, curlew are attracted to fields where cattle are grazing – feeding on the insects attracted to cow-pats – and probing where the cattle have churned up the field’s surface. 

Important to lapwing, snipe and redshank is the nearness of a ‘water’s edge’, be this a ditch on the field boundary or a small splash or pond in the ‘wet corner’. There, both adults and young will find adequate insect food, but bare and dredged ditch sides will expose them to all manner of predators.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

The first priority is predator control. Birds will avoid nesting in areas where they are vulnerable to attack by corvids (particularly carrion crows and magpies) or by mammals such as foxes, stoats, weasels and particularly mink. Larsen traps, tunnel traps, mink rafts and lamping will all make effective inroads into the predator population and give the birds some respite

Land management. ‘Preparation’ of the ground by cattle grazing into the winter, to produce suitable spring sward, controlled topping of soft rush – particularly avoiding the breeding season – and ‘sympathetic’ ditch management to retain waterside cover, will all help to provide encouraging conditions for breeding waders.

Try to minimise human disturbance. Organise any shoot work days for these areas to take place during July and August, after the chicks have fledged and left the vicinity.