A Visit to Clyde Valley Wader Group

Bruce Cooper of Glen Prosen estate watches lapwing chicks near Crawfordjohn

A team from Working for Waders recently headed into Lanarkshire to meet the Clyde Valley Wader Group near Crawfordjohn. This group of farmers has blazed a trail for wader conservation over the last few years, enjoying support from SAC and RSPB to monitor birds and develop action plans for the future of waders in the area.

Many of the farmers are working on the moorland fringe in upland farms around the Duneaton valley, and they’re homing in on ideas around the restoration of traditional cropping which once served as a major boost for wading birds. As times have changed and old-fashioned farming has become less economically viable, there has been a tendency to abandon crops like cereals and brassicas including kale and turnips. A few small trial plots have shown that lapwings are extremely keen on these crop residues in late spring during the early nesting season, and one field near Crawfordjohn attracted an extraordinarily high number of nesting lapwings this year.

Looking to the future, it’s useful to work out how crops like these can be funded. Financial support is helpful, but many farmers also need practical advice on establishing crops which they might not have grown before. There is plenty that Working for Waders can do to help with this kind of thinking, and we’re looking at ways to treat this part of the Clyde Valley Wader Group’s work as a pilot for other parts of the country.

After a discussion in the village hall, the visitors and farmers went to look at a field where old brassica residues had recently been reseeded with arable silage. The contractors had managed to work around the nests and a number of little lapwing chicks were visible in the new crop. Discussion ranged around a number of topics, not least the matter of badgers which are reckoned to be very abundant in this area. The local gamekeeper was on hand to confirm that badgers now outnumber foxes many times over, and there’s no doubt this is a challenge for wading birds.

In 2021, several nearby nests were raided by badgers and the footage was captured on nest cameras, but badgers seem to have had less of an effect in 2022. Some predation was recorded early in the season, but nests were relaid and the number of successful sittings was very encouraging. This work not only feeds into a wider understanding of how and where predation is most significant, but it also provides some encouraging evidence that even where predators are abundant, wader productivity can still be strong.