Tag: Curlew

A photograph of a Curlew being held in two hands. The bird has been fitted with a satellite tag to track its movements.

WWRG data to be used in a new PhD project

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Beyond borders: habitat use of wintering Eurasian Curlew in and around coastal SPAs

We’re pleased to announce that WWRG data will be at the centre of a new PhD opportunity jointly supervised by WWRG members Sam Franks and Katharine Bowgen at the BTO and Christine Beardsworth at Liverpool John Moores University along with Julia Nowack. This PhD will make extensive use of our Curlew ringing and tagging data, along with new fieldwork, to understand winter habitat use of this declining Red Listed species.

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A photograph of a Curlew being held in two hands. The bird has been fitted with a satellite tag to track its movements.

Curlew and windfarms

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Curlew, a Near Threatened species, are a major feature of The Wash where they occur in nationally important numbers. They are declining throughout their range and, in the UK: the 25-year (to winter 2019–20) population trend for Curlew is -33% and the 10 year -18%. We see them feeding on both the tidal mudflats and on the inland fields, where they eat earthworms.

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Newly ringed Curlew about to be released, by Cathy Ryden

Why The Wash is so important for Curlew: selected stories from over 60 years of Wader Study

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Curlew are declining so alarmingly that they are now ‘Red-Listed’ as birds of conservation concern. The Wash is one of the two main UK sites for both passage and wintering Eurasian Curlew (the other being Morecambe Bay – WeBS data). Autumn passage birds use the intertidal mudflats to feed on polychaete worms, shellfish and Green Crabs. Some birds will move on to smaller sites around the Norfolk coast, the southwest of England, and northwest France. Here they will spend the winter before returning to their breeding grounds. The majority of Curlew using the Wash breed in Finland and Sweden, a migratory journey of over 1,000 miles. There is more background information on our Curlew page.

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Flagged Curlew in flight

Ten years of colour-marking Curlew on the Wash – what have we learnt?

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Curlew use the Wash both as a passage site to moult during autumn and as a wintering location. On a global scale, they are ‘Near Threatened’ i.e. vulnerable to extinction and they are present in Internationally important numbers on the Wash. Declines in the UK breeding population have placed Curlew in the highest category of UK bird conservation concern; therefore, the species is a priority for the group in terms of long-term conservation monitoring. We started to mark a proportion of the population on the eastern shore of the Wash with unique leg flags in 2012. This allows us to accurately determine their survival and assess wintering habitat use.

Since then, a total of 478 birds have been marked and we have had over 5,000 re-encounters recorded by over 200 WWRG volunteers and members of the public. We regularly dedicate fieldwork hours to ensure we have sufficient resightings to determine survival and winter distribution. This steady stream of data has started to be used in scientific publications to describe the east Wash Curlew population. This blog is a summary of what we have learnt so far.

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Photo of Sanderling on a shingle beach, taken at the birds' eye level. Photo by Cathy Ryden.

Fieldwork October 2021

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Plan for the weekend

This was always going to be a challenging weekend! We had a number of targets and hoped to achieve some of them. The weather forecast was for it to be mild, with light winds, but foggy nights and early mornings.

We had arranged for BBC AutumnWatch to come out and film our work but they could only make the Saturday morning. We had still failed to catch a single Curlew on our east shore study area and had ten GPS/GSM tags to deploy. This is the single largest expenditure on a project that the group had made (£12,000) in its 60-year history so we did not want to have to leave them in a box until next year. We then had an Oystercatcher tag that had already been on two Oystercatchers and had just been found on a beach after the silicone harness had broken (as they are meant to do).

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