Ground Cry: The Last Stand for Ground-Nesting Birds

A question for you, one for inclusion in the next hunt quiz in the back room of the Fox and Geese, before hunts and rural pubs cease to exist: what is the difference between nidifugous and nidicolous? Answer: the former describes birds with young that are precocious and leave the nest shortly after hatching, normally because they are ground nesting birds that nest in the open. Whereas nidicolous birds, normally ones that nest in trees or holes, tend to have chicks that remain featherless and helpless for a period while they are reared in the nest. (The same distinctions apply to animals such as, for example, hares and rabbits).

It’s a bit of trivia that may become less and less useful to you as many ground nesting birds (GNBs) face a similar existential threat to that faced by hunts and rural pubs and may not be around for too much longer, unless drastic action is taken.

Noah Complex

GNBs have been much on my mind recently. Over the last quarter of a century, driven by what I call my Noah Complex, I have done what I can to conserve as many different bird species as possible on my patch. First on a smallholding at the foot of Wensleydale, near Bedale in North Yorkshire, then, after we moved home full-time, on a mixed farm in Dumfries and Galloway.

It has been gratifying to the point of addiction to see the various effects of nearly three decades of tree and hedge planting, pond digging and other habitat creations. In my experience, for many bird species, investing in their factors of production can pretty much guarantee dividends. Ponds start as muddy holes then miraculously acquire the full cast of aquatic plants then, hey presto, dragonflies and ducks.

We didn’t have many hedges to start with, and those we did have had been Bonsaied into lifelessness by some previous tenants. Now, after years of planting and latterly laying hedges, and very light-touch trimming, I could confidently take you to see, or at least hear, yellowhammers and whitethroats, in fact most of the warblers, and five species of finch. Sparrows and thrushes are two-a-penny here. More cowpats on our fields have equalled more insects and by leaving shed doors open through the summer, more swallows. Starlings are now so numerous as to be in danger of becoming a menace again. Woodland birds such as blackcaps and tree creepers are also doing well and improving as we migrate from Sitka spruce to native hardwoods and Scots Pine.

It’s the GNBs that have been disappointing. Conserving them is like pushing on a bit of string. The disappointment is more keenly felt because often the sacrifice has been much greater. Turning a wet bit where nothing grows into a pond isn’t a big financial hit. And one can just about justify losing productive land to a hedge for the wind shelter and shade it gives to stock, plus the added benefits cattle get from browsing hedge plants. But not mowing or grazing a grass field until July really, really is expensive, even if there is sometimes a (usually very bureaucratic) subsidy scheme to take the sting out of it. Bear in mind that in order to produce over 3m litres of milk annually we aim to take ten grazings a year here each with knee high grass on our ‘adaptive multi-paddock grazing system' and if grass is locked up for hay or silage for too long it stops growing.

Mowing is, we should be honest about it, the biggest factor on a lowland farm for most GNBs. In Yorkshire we were fortunate to be able to let our two fields to a neighbour, the late and much missed Frank Thornton. Frank’s wife Lynne had a livery business and he was prepared to live with my prohibition on mowing until after 1st July. It was a perfect system for producing seedy hay for horses. Not being able to take two cuts, though he had the aftermath grazing for his sheep, meant he was able to drive the rent right down, like a true Yorkshireman. But the magical rippling crescendo notes of a pair of curlews courting in the meadow each spring and sometimes , with luck, the sight of their young later in the summer were worth more to me than the discount on the rent.

We usually had a covey of wild, grey partridges about the place as well. That was in the early noughties. You would be unlikely to see either now. With hindsight I think my success was beginner’s luck and relied heavily on the neighbours’ keepering efforts on farms and estates around our twenty acre plot, also we didn’t have either a footpath or a badger sett nearby and there were less avian predators around in those days.

There have been some successes here in Galloway too, particularly since we stopped doing arable on most of the land and put it down to grass. Skylarks, linnets and meadow pipits are hanging on here after seven years of dairying. I can usually rely on a lark ascending and singing his heart out if I go to one of the more open parts of the farm. So, we must be doing something right with our mob grazing and the mosaic of pastures of different lengths it creates. Meadow birds have evolved alongside cattle and some broods must be managing to get out of the way of grazing cows. We have stopped rolling grass in the spring, which has helped, I think. But there should be far more of them and I’m sure we could farm smarter to increase their numbers.

We have also been attempting to re-establish wild grey partridges, common here until the 1970s, but so far without much success.

A bit of history

This sea-level farm is not traditional breeding territory for curlews, known locally as whaups. They didn’t nest here in Victorian times according to Hugh S Gladstone’s The Birds of Dumfriesshire (1910), one of my favourite bird books. The Gladstones of Capenoch are still there, and still family friends. Many of the birds are not, alas. But we have lots of curlews here outside the breeding season as our foreshore, and therefore also our fields at high tide, are, to Europe’s curlew population what Tebay Services, John Norris’s shop in Penrith and the House of Bruar are to a certain type of Englishman. I therefore take a keen interest in the conservation efforts of those in the uplands, who do so much to preserve this wonderful bird and those of other winter visitors to the Solway such as the golden plover, now sadly much rarer than they were when I was growing up and learning to shoot. (See former Prime Minister, Lord Home’s Border Reflections for a lesson in how to stalk golden plover by holding on to the tail of a cow!). The end of heather burning may well be another nail in the golden plover's coffin.

Lapwings on the other hand were very numerous around here in coastal parishes all year round back in Gladstone's day – no doubt with two migrating populations. In October 1900 he records a flock of “at least 50,000” in a seven acre field near Maxwelltown just 12 miles from us, “whose murmurings were audible three hundred yards away.” Incidentally the collective noun for lapwings is a 'deceit', reflecting their extraordinary camouflage, no doubt.

We should see this in perspective, 1910 in Dumfriesshire was, probably the best time and place to be a ground nesting bird. The Forestry Commission was still nine years away and there were no sitka spruce plantations. The county was then one of the richest places on earth with wealth flooding in from across the Empire, particularly from India and Hong Kong, and much of it was being spent on gamekeepers' wages. Conversely, it would not have been a great time to be a stoat, a magpie or a red kite, or even a tawny owl; there was an eradication of predator species that still stains our folk memory and affects public debate today. We have struggled to find a balance in our ecosystem ever since and, in my opinion, the pendulum has swung too far the other way.

The lapwings had all but gone by my childhood in the 1970s, their demise hastened by the chemical revolution and the shift from hay to silage. However, in the early years of this decade, we started having some success again with peewits. The northern end of the farm is flat grassland, reclaimed merse (salt marsh), and by taking out a few trees to remove crow perches and leaving a few bits undrained, so that there is often standing water well into May, we have good enough habitat to have had a few broods fledge successfully. But it is uphill work and the overall trend in recent years has been starkly downwards.

Unfortunately, our best wader breeding territory is sandwiched between two villages and, as I recounted in a recent Scribehound article, it is very difficult to prevent disturbance by walkers. And though, thanks to our shoot volunteers, we do a pretty good job of keeping foxes and corvids at bay, I can’t do anything about the increasingly numerous badgers in the wood at the south end of our wader hot spot, or the increasingly numerous gulls coming inland for a quick snack, or the increasingly numerous red kites, or the increasingly numerous otters coming off the burn, etc. etc.etc. And when there have been nests, all too often they have been predated.

The main predator for hedgerow birds is the sparrow hawk but a trophic cascade of sorts appears to have been operating here for a while with goshawks keeping the sparrow hawk population in check. But there is no such 'landscape of fear' for meso-predators out in the middle of our fields and the peewits are not there in sufficient numbers to carry out mobbing successfully.

The Four-Legged Stool

The Four-legged stool really only has two reliable legs here. (The fourth leg refers to disturbance. See Potts R as amended by Blackett J on Scribehound 2026) And I am beginning to think not in terms of milking stools but of all the stars needing to be aligned for us to have lapwings fledge here successfully in future.

I have a plan to dig rhills in likely lapwing fields, similar to those at Elmley. These ditches may provide better cover for wader chicks than existing wader scrapes. But the melancholy thought occurs to me that by providing the right habitat and encouraging waders to breed, I may just be setting an ecological trap and setting them up for failure.

Actually, I have lots of plans on the backs of various fag packets. We could harness all the various technologies now available to us to farm in a more GNB friendly way. We could use Chirrup remote sensor birdsong recognition technology to help plot likely territories and use AI to plan our grazing and silaging. The dry cow hay or silage doesn't have to be so nutritious and could be made later in the fields with the fewest trees and therefore the safest habitat.

We measure grass religiously each day anyway so it would not be difficult to quantify the cost of leaving some leys uncut longer. The cost of making up the lost nutritional value by putting bought-in concentrates into the diet mixer later in the year can be quantified in seconds by one click of a mouse using AI. A few more clicks could submit an invoice to a natural capital fund for recompense, if such a scheme were available.

A lot of casualties occur when mowing takes place. I keep briefing the latest youth sent by the contractors to mow the silage fields with giant mowers mounted fore and aft on his tractor. But I am not always around to ensure that our fields are mown in such a way that wildlife is pushed towards cover. Better training is required. Better still, precision farming software could direct the tractor along the optimum route for that field without human error.

Better still, the chirrup sensors having located likely nesting spots, drones could be used to pinpoint nests and mark them on the software so that patches are left uncut altogether. Again, these could be automatically quantified digitally and compensation paid.

The same precision farming software could be used to turn off the fertiliser spreader or slurry injector to create skylark patches.

Also we know that ivermectin wormers are responsible for killing insects, so we could be smarter at avoiding grazing certain fields post treatment and using anthelmintic plants in the leys to reduce the use of harmful wormers altogether.

And so it goes on.

But we could go to a lot of effort and expense and still fail because our approach is not holistic enough, the insurance not fully comprehensive. For farmers to be persuaded to make already complex farming operations even more complex and sacrifice yields there would have to be a more credible chance of success.

It is all very well blaming farming but other ground nesting birds that don't nest on farmland, such as capercaillie and native woodcock (NB not those that nest in Siberia or Scandinavia) are equally threatened.

There are now so many factors beyond our control down here at farm level. Things like the predator imbalance and the difficulty in restricting disturbance need political action to sort out. And politicians, who now follow public opinion like sheep rather than trying to shape it, are not likely to do what is necessary until social attitudes to predator control and restrictions on access change. So we must change them, one social media post at a time.

It is almost impossible to have a sensible conversation about doing what needs to be done to give GNBs a fighting chance. Many in the conservation establishment are Eco-naïve, those who believe that if ecosystems are left to their own devices , in the absence of apex predators they will somehow sort themselves out in such a way that every species prospers. They tweet about birds "evolving alongside badgers for millions of years," ignoring the unprecedented density of badgers in 21st century UK. Or they fold their arms and say, "That's why we need wolves."

Pachyderm-Blindness

Then there are those who deliberately ignore the elephants in the room. Below is an illustrative graph produced by AI from open sources showing trends over the last fifty years. The decline in the numbers of lapwings, curlews, capercaillies and skylarks broadly mirrors the rise in lesser black-backed gulls, badgers, domestic cats and regular countryside walkers. It's very broad brush and open to criticism, and not designed to prove direct cause and effect, but it's clear enough to be an elephant.

I call this condition pachyderm-blindness and its sufferers tusk-deniers. The tusk-deniers have a variety of motives for feigning ignorance and indulging in whataboutery. Their latest false narrative concerns releasing pheasants. In a recent edition of the normally sane magazine Country Life, Mark Cocker asserted, "These animals (pheasants) are...driving fox predation of other beleaguered ground-nesting birds, such as curlews and lapwings." It's an effective message because it is a logical fallacy but it's bollocks when you think about it. Any huntsman will tell you that back in the day it was rare to find a fox on a big shoot. And pheasants and waders are not often colocated. In any case, GWCT research, commissioned by Natural England, refutes many of the allegations made about reared pheasants. But 'a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on'.

Meanwhile the conservation industry grows ever bigger and richer and GNBs decline further while no one is prepared to address the issues.

There are excellent organisations such as GWCT that are limited to research and others doing sterling work, such as Curlew Action and Songbird Survival, that are limited by species.

But the main bird protection organisations are failing in their task of preventing the extirpation of ground nesting birds across the UK.

We can't go on like this. Something must be done.

A Plan

My proposal is a UK-wide campaign to save meadow birds, waders and other GNBs. It's little more than an idea at the moment but I hope it will attract bird lovers from across the spectrum and gain broad support.

I have provisionally called it Ground Cry.

Ground because the common factor between the most endangered birds in the UK is nesting on the ground, and because it will be a campaign started on the ground floor by people who are grounded in conservation. If it sounds similar to Groundswell then that is deliberate: regenerative farming is part of the solution.

Cry because it evokes the cries of many of our waders. And because it is a cry of sorrow and frustration, a cry for help and a cry for action, a war cry.

We need to break the impasse where one side blames a lack of predator control and the other blames modern farming and nothing gets done because there is an unwillingness to grasp the painful political nettle to tackle both issues at once. Nothing less than a holistic approach will do.

Ground Cry will campaign to raise public awareness and change public opinions where necessary to make it easier for legislators to act,

Ground Cry will accept farming and shooting as important industries to work with rather than opponents to frustrate. We need to move beyond the culture wars and focus on what works, not what is ideologically correct.

Ground Cry will point out that the current drive to cover land with trees and laissez faire wilding are, with some exceptions, disastrous for many GNBs and will campaign for the preservation of open habitats.

Ground Cry will demand greater pragmatism in licensing predator control and allowing greater flexibility for relocation schemes such as hen harrier brood management.

We need to accept that if you can't measure something you can't manage it. Ground Cry will call for greater transparency and accountability for bird populations on nature reserves, particularly those in receipt of taxpayers' money.

We need to use all the means at our disposal to find more intelligent ways to ensure that ground nesting birds, farming and recreation can coexist successfully. And it is hoped Ground Cry may develop better strategies and work with retailers to establish accreditation schemes.

Ground Cry has already established a presence on the main social media and there is a website www.groundcry.com. Please follow us and tell your friends. And, if you can, volunteer your services.

Onwards.