The 2024 Wader Calendar season is nearly over…

A look back on the 2024 breeding season by Dave Parish, WfW chair.

The Working for Waders and BTO Wader Calendar is a simple means of recording the number of waders in an area across the breeding season.

I took part in this project for the first time this year. I’m not a farmer but kept an eye on a small patch of land nearby as I cycled round rural Angus. This started very promisingly, with one field holding around eight pairs of lapwing, out of which I was able to locate four nests. The field was a scruffy fallow consisting of last year’s stubble, so it wasn’t the easiest to survey from the roadside and I never did manage to pin-down any other nests, but there was a lot of display activity across the site. I was concerned early on because the field seemed to be heavily used by lesser black-backed gulls and a variety of corvids, but – as far as I could tell – ‘my’ birds suffered no losses, until…

On one of my visits in late May, I was dismayed to find that the field had finally been ploughed (it was resown with grass shortly after). I had been expecting it for some time, but thought we might have got away with it this year as I had seen my first chick shortly before. I’ve revisited several times since and unfortunately, none of the birds decided to relay and on my last two or three visits, I haven’t seen any birds.

Although this was a very disappointing outcome, it highlighted a couple of interesting points. First, it reminded me just how attractive fallow areas can be – this field was surrounded by a couple of rape fields and lush, uniform pastures, so in comparison it offered good cover and a lack of interference. It was supporting the only breeding waders I saw this year on my travels, and I covered a large area on my trusty bike. This made me think, is there something innovative we can do with EFA (Ecological Focus Area) fallow, or via the Agri-Environment Climate Scheme, to make it easier for farmers to maintain these areas a little longer? Something we shall be looking into.

The other take-home for me from this experience was just how on a knife-edge so many of our breeding wader populations are. I’ve no idea if ‘my’ birds will come back again next year – and if they do, where they will end up if there isn’t another fallow nearby – but if a plough reduces their breeding efforts to zero again next year, how many more years will they keep returning?

I hope you have had a more encouraging season than me, and I urge you to please share your data with us when the season is over. The recording period for the Wader Calendar has another week or two to run until the end of July, after which data can be shared by following the guidance on the BTO Wader Hub website (https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/wader-calendar). We can learn so much from your experiences and better understand what’s happening to waders across Scotland, and it can point us towards issues we need to give thought to. We hope to summarise these results and share the outcomes with you in some form in the near future.