 terms of waders are many Lapwings particularly Blacksmith and Crowned, and Coursers such as Temminck’s, Burchell’s and Double-banded.
‘Ah! Those Autumn mornings and evenings! How I love them! What stirring scenes among the birds I can recall; what stores of notes I made! How vividly some of them return; incidents of twenty years ago, among what were peaceful fields and wooded valleys then, but now, alas, the busy centre of a score industries. All those mighty trees, where the Rooks and Ring Doves bred, have bowed their noble heads before the axe; all the brushwood and the thickets and the close-set hedgerows, where the Warblers and Finches nested, are gone; all the tangled ditches and hollows, sacred to the Grasshopper Lark, and the Jack Snipe, Levelled away! … No longer does the air resound with song at morn and even; all the feathered hosts are gone; the trout-stream is little more than an open drain; and one of the fairest sylvan scenes that ever eye of man gazed upon is now a desolation of bricks and mortar, and a wilderness of tall chimney shafts, factories and workshops! My ruined Aviary!’
This passage was written by Charles Dixon in his book The Annals of Bird life – a year book of British Ornithology in 1890 and it just goes to show that nothing changes. It could have been written by any one of a countless number of people who can remember places that they frequented, as a younger person, full of birds and song that now are gone; replaced by urban sprawl.
Human Population Expansion
Stand on any motorway bridge at rush hour, spend an hour or so in any international airport lounge, or take a look at one of those live population counters on the internet, and you will soon realise there is an awful lot of people in the world and that the number is getting bigger every minute.
This seemingly unstoppable growth is probably the single biggest problem the world faces as it generates a need for ever growing, ever stronger, and ever more stable economies to support all those people. In addition these economies become an ever greater consumer of resources and water. These factors mean more pressure is put on every inch of available land to be used for the purposes of food production and the provision of safe drinking water supplies, usually to the exclusion of all else. In addition, the energy required to service all these economies is rapidly increasing and, despite good intentions of renewable energy, this seems to be leading to the change in the climate that we are experiencing.
Conversely, across the world, study after study is recording declines in wader populations. Some flyways are losing as much as eighty-six per cent of their waders, others may be losing just thirty-three per cent, but the average loss across the board shows that nearly half of our waders have already disappeared! Across North America seventy per cent of waders have been lost, especially Arctic breeding species. In the UK alone Northern Lapwings have declined by eighty per cent over the last fifty years. Eurasian Curlews have undergone a similar decline in England, Wales and Scotland, while Ireland has lost a staggering ninety-seven per cent of its breeding Eurasian Curlew population.
All waders are preyed upon in one way or another but there are two main categories of predator, natural and unnatural. Natural threats come from the air in the form of aerial predators such as falcons and hawks preying on adults and also other raptors and crows when eggs and chicks are involved. To give you some idea of the level of threat and levels of intelligence a clutch of eggs faces there was an example of an Australian Kestrel visiting the nest of a Hooded Plover. It visited the nest several times while the eggs were in place. It was clear the bird was inspecting to see if the eggs had hatched and thus provide a suitable meal for it. Finally the Kestrel was thwarted after all its patience when the eggs were plundered by a crow before actually hatching.
Although less of a threat to fit adult birds terrestrial animals such as foxes, badgers, stoats, weasels and 