http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=537642
Farms reap healthy crop of the ugly bird that faced extinction
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
03 July 2004
Bulging eyes. Knobbly knees. The distinctive stone curlew is one of
Britain's most peculiar-looking birds. But now it has a distinction of
another sort: it's doing better at recovering its once-falling numbers
than any of Britain's much-threatened farmland bird species, having
increased its population by more than half in 20 years.
While skylarks, grey partridges, lapwings and turtle doves have plunged
catastrophically over recent decades, a conservation programme for the
stone curlew has borne significant fruit - and its success is largely
down to co-operation from farmers themselves.
The key has been finding the birds' nests early in the breeding season,
then notifying farmers so agricultural operations can take account of
them. As a result, numbers have gone from about 170 pairs in Britain in
the mid-1980s - the bird's low point - to about 260 pairs today.
It has to be said that Burhinus oedicnemus does not look like a typical
inhabitant of the English countryside. It is more like the roadrunner
bird from the old cartoons, a scrawny inhabitant of a scrawny
landscape, and indeed, its typical Eurasian habitat is bare steppeland.
It is the only European member of the thick-knees, a very distinctive
bird family, but its eyes are even more noticeable. As one bird guide
puts it: "Prominent yellow and black eye appears to glare malevolently
on pale striped head."
Across Europe the bird's numbers are dropping steadily as intensive
farming takes away its living room, and this was formerly the case in
Britain too.
From between 1,000 and 2,000 pairs scattered across the UK in the
1930s, the stone curlew's range shrank to two widely-separated pockets
- the chalk downlands of Wiltshire, and the Brecklands of Norfolk, the
sandy, pine-covered terrain near Thetford Forest. There, the bird has
come to favour nesting in fields of young crops, and it is there that
work by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and
English Nature has had the most success. Each spring the RSPB project
officer, Tim Cowan, helped by three assistants, combs more than 30,000
acres of farmland between Swaffham in the north and Bury St Edmunds in
the south, first looking for the birds, and then looking for their
nests. Their locations are then notified to the farmers concerned - and
almost universally they are spared from the destruction that ploughing,
hoeing or harvesting would otherwise bring.
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