Nest Cameras 2022
Some images from 2022’s Nest Camera Project
During the course of 2022’s wader breeding season, we’ve been running a Nest Camera Project to monitor wader nests and learn more about the challenges facing wading birds in Scotland. This project was established in 2021, but it was considerably enlarged this year to include more than one hundred cameras all across Scotland, from dairy farms in South West Scotland, to grouse moors in Angus and Aberdeenshire. We’ve covered an enormous area this year, and Working for Waders would like to thank everybody who’s been involved.
A big project like this requires a great deal of follow-up work, and we’re still trialling a number of different ways to process and store the data produced over the last few weeks. This is a work in progress, but we’re also aware that a number of people ran cameras informally, without any involvement from our project. If you set a trail camera at a wader’s nest in 2022, we’d love to hear how you got on. We’ve put together a Google Form to gather some basic information on nesting attempts - please feel free to fill it in!
It’s too soon to give a complete picture of how the Nest Camera Project went in 2022. Some birds are still sitting on eggs, and several participants are still to process and return their data. Informally, we can say that we’ve seen a reasonable number of successful nesting attempts this year, suggesting that this has been a good year for waders in Scotland. Birds (particularly lapwings) have not always been showing up in reliable numbers, but where they’ve settle down to breed, success rates have been positive. Of course nest cameras are no good for gathering information on what happens to chicks after they’ve hatched, but initial signs have been very encouraging.
We’ve recently published a blog article about the number of sheep which have been found damaging nests and eating eggs in 2022. This behaviour is not unheard of, but we were surprised by how often it happened this year. We’re going to look into this in more detail, but there are a number of potential explanations for this behaviour and we hope it will be possible to mitigate this issue. We also need to keep it in context - it’s certainly a significant issue in some places, but it’s unlikely to be a driver of wader decline at a national level. As is always the case, there’s no single driver for the loss of wading birds in Scotland, and sheep are just one of many factors at play.
Alongside livestock, we also recorded a number of predators raiding nests and stealing eggs. Badgers were a significant predator on all the species we monitored, but badger predation has been less noticeable in 2022, and the picture is quite complex. Foxes, pine martens, crows and ravens also took their toll on nests, and while some of these species can be managed by pest controllers, others cannot. This is an area we would like to focus on, but while there’s doubt that predator control is a crucial tool for wader conservation, it’s also worth saying that many areas without predator control have seen excellent wader productivity this year.
The Nest Camera Project was designed to highlight some of the key issues around wader conservation, and in that respect it’s becoming a really important tool to help us engage with farmers, land managers and the general public. Thanks again to everybody who’s been involved, and we look forward to processing the data with our project partners over the coming weeks.