Headstarting Chicks Helps Ireland's Curlew Numbers
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What emergency conservation measure is being used to save Ireland's curlew?
Now, we're going to talk about one of the emergency measures underway to save Ireland's curlews from disappearing altogether. The population has crashed in recent decades. If you're a regular listener to Mooney Goes Wild, you'll know that. Actually, Eric Dempsey does a lot of the bird counts in Ireland, and he's particularly focused in on the curlew. He made a documentary for us, which we'll put a link to on the website so you can have a listen back. In the last few weeks, 20 head-started chicks, now bear that in mind, head-started chicks, were released on Lock Corb, hatched from eggs flown in from the Yorkshire Dales, reared at Dublin Zoo and given a safe start before being set free. Eoghan Murphy joins us now to explain how it all works.
Eoghan is the manager of the Breeding Waiters European Project. We've had him on the programme in the past. This time he's talking about Curlew. Eoghan, how are you? Hiya Derek, how's things? All good, Eoin, at this end. Thank you very much indeed. Now, will you start by explaining exactly what Headstarting is?
Headstarting has been undertaken in Ireland. I think this is maybe the fifth year, possibly the sixth year, one of those early years Kendra was involved in, as was one of the Nest Protection Officers working for the Cardio Conservation Programme. So we have been building, gradually building, I suppose, expertise and knowledge in relation to Headstarting. What's limiting us in Ireland at the moment is our ability to find eggs because we only have 100 pairs, 120 pairs of curlew left and they're a very cryptic species. So it's really difficult to actually find eggs in the wild. And head starting as a conservation measure is directly linked to how many eggs can you head start. We've done the modelling, NPWS and the RSPB were involved in a model in relation to head starting for curlew.
and it shows that quantity invariably brings back more birds into a breeding population. So head starting itself is an emergency measure. We're taking eggs from the wild, we're incubating and rearing those chicks and releasing them as fledglings. And the reason we're doing that is because we know the life cycle of a lot of our ground nesting birds is failing in that egg and chick stage. They're just not getting chicks away and recruited into the adult populations. Adults are surviving year on year quite well, same as we would expect them to do in any European country. So it's our ability to be productive, to have productive breeding populations of some of these ground-listing boroughs that's so problematic.
There's a few questions come to my mind. I should ask you the second question first, because I'm afraid I might forget it. But in Ireland, we have, as you said, 100 breeding pairs that are resident here in Ireland. Is that correct? Is that what you mean by that? Because we do get a lot of winter visitors, don't we?
Yeah.
Huge numbers.
And this is one of the things that sometimes people look at me and they think, this lad is, you know, he's ranting and raving. He's off the wall, yeah. Yeah. And there's a couple of hundred birds in my little bay and on the East Coast or the West Coast. We get a big influx, as we do with an awful lot of our waders. These birds come from northern latitudes down to Ireland for a mild climate during the winter. And they, of course, are joined by our resident breeding birds. But it is hard for people to get a grips because they look out and they see a load of red shank or loads of lapwing or loads of curlew and they say, there's nothing wrong with these populations.
There's nothing wrong with this population. So the question is, and it's related to that, my question is this. So you've taken these eggs from Yorkshire, from the Yorkshire Dales. Are they eggs from wild bird populations that were resident in Yorkshire or that came in? in the winter. Where are these birds going to go? Are they going to stay in Ireland? Are they going to be resident in Ireland? Are they going to go to the Yorkshire Dales and then come back? Or are they going to go Africa, wherever they've come from?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What emergency conservation measure is being used to save Ireland's curlew?
0:05–3:49
2
How does headstarting work and why is it used for curlew chicks?
3:49–5:32
3
Why are Ireland's curlew numbers so low despite large winter flocks?
5:32–13:20
4
Where did the eggs come from and will head‑started birds stay in Ireland?
13:20–17:46
5
How are head‑started chicks reared, released and tracked in the field?
17:46–22:43