Setting Cameras

The Working for Waders nest camera project is now in its fourth year, and it continues to uncover all kinds of new and interesting information about wading birds. Here, Patrick Laurie explains why he’s found wader monitoring so useful over the last four years. 

There are lots of simple narratives about the decline of wading birds. Some people blame farmers or foresters - other people blame badgers or ramblers who walk their dogs off leads during the breeding season. There’s probably truth in all of these perceptions, but the reality is far more complex and variable than any one answer. When I first started setting nest cameras in 2020, I wanted to gather information which backed up my preconceived idea that predation by foxes and badgers was the single most important driver of wader decline. The project was exciting because I felt that it allowed me to gather data and contribute towards conversations which couldn’t be usefully held without access to hard facts. I was surprised and frustrated that while I “knew” foxes and badgers were destroying wader nests, I didn’t actually have any evidence to prove it. So I set out to find that evidence.

It’s not easy to set cameras at wader nests. In fact, it can be extremely difficult and time consuming. Provided you work sensibly, there’s no real risk to the nest or of driving birds to abandon their eggs – Working for Waders has published guidance on this, but we’ve never seen a nest that was abandoned because a camera was set nearby. The difficulty is that in trying to set a camera to identify the cause of success or failure in a nest, you’re attempting to catch what might only be a single second of action in several weeks of repetition and boredom. And sod’s law dictates that in that moment of action, your memory card will be full or your batteries will be flat – perhaps the sun will be at the wrong angle or condensation will cloud the lens. There are a hundred things which can go wrong, and even when everything lines up in your favour, there can still be questionmarks. After weeks of work and attention on a camera, the nest can be predated by an unidentifiable shadow which appears in the night and vanishes again. Perhaps it was a badger – but in the quest for definitive, incontrovertible “hard evidence”, nest cameras can be an extremely frustrating tool.

But it’s also important to acknowledge that working cameras at wader nests has taught me an enormous amount about birds like oystercatchers and lapwings. Badgers and foxes are a major issue, but their impact is not consistent. In some years, all nests are taken by badgers – in other years, their impact is less obvious. It turned out that I was wrong to believe that predation was the single most important factor.

Most of the nests I’ve followed have been lost through agricultural operations – even when farmers were involved in the monitoring. A great deal of tractor-work is undertaken by contractors who come on unpredictable schedules and carry out chores at break-neck speed. Nobody is more disappointed than the farmers when nests are lost in this way, and it’s unfair to blame “farming” when we really mean a single aspect of the industry. Likewise, when sheep have sometimes been filmed eating wader eggs as part of this project, it’s been puzzling to work out why – and to think about whether or not this is a major cause of wader decline at local or national levels. It seems unlikely, but we just don’t know for sure. It’s also easy to get carried away with narratives which arise from monitoring wader nest cameras, forgetting that habitat loss is a major driver of wader decline. We can only set cameras in places where there are nests – in places where extensive areas of wader habitat have been lost to forestry plantations, there’s nothing to record.

Even as I write this, I have three cameras running on lapwing nests on my farm. Following the progress of these birds is fascinating, and it encourages me to think very carefully about what these birds are up against. We already know a great deal about wader conservation, and I am in full support of projects which match the need to gather data against the urgency of delivering action on the ground today. We don’t always need to discover exactly what the problem is before we start the general process of fixing things, and we have a pretty clear view on what wading birds require. It’s obvious that time is a critical factor, and we could easily study these birds into extinction – but gathering information as we go and feeding stories and data into the Working for Waders nest camera project is part of the solution. Perhaps it feels small, but the problems are so large that nobody can tackle them head-on. We each need to do our part.

If you’d like to run a camera at a wader nest in 2024, please read our guidance and contact Working for Waders for more details on how you can help our work.