Wader birds such as curlews and lapwings are under severe threat due to habitat loss, intensive agriculture and the climate crisis.
In time for World Curlew Day earlier this week (21 April), Fota Wildlife Park and partners launched this year’s ‘headstarting’ programme to help protect and restore Ireland’s native curlew population.
Curlews are ground-nesting wader birds that require access to water and invertebrate-rich soil, which makes them particularly vulnerable to land-use changes, predators and the climate crisis. Their conservation status is currently red, with their numbers and ranges having declined substantially in recent decades.
The ‘headstarting’ process involves collecting curlew eggs in the wild, incubating and hatching them, and rearing the chicks until they are strong enough to be released again.
This year’s Breeding Waders European Innovation Partnership (EIP) hopes to build on the success of last year’s programme, which saw 27 curlews released into the wild after being reared at Fota.
“It is unfortunate that we must resort to emergency measures to boost curlew populations through headstarting,” said Donal Beagan, who is headstarting and nest protection manager for the Breeding Waders EIP. “However, this technique gives us significant hope.
“These birds are long-lived, so increasing their numbers should have lasting effects. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done in terms of landscape habitat, predation risk management, and policy before we can restore healthy breeding curlew populations in our countryside.”
In a video posted to YouTube earlier this week, Jess, a ranger at Fota, explained how the team at the park have been preparing for the headstarting season.
“So, we’ve been running our incubators since the beginning of March, we’re trying to calibrate our incubators and make sure that they are running completely precisely to mimic the bird sitting on the eggs,” she said.
“Obviously these eggs are extremely, extremely important for the curlew breeding so we want to just make sure that everything is super accurate to increase our hatchability.”
Fota has been involved in the Curlew EIP project for a number of years, she said, and the team is excited for the eggs to start coming in.
The team are preparing rearing tubs where the chicks will live for the first five to seven days of their lives, and rearing pens with grass to encourage the chicks’ development for the following two weeks, to ready them for release back into the wild.
The current Breeding Waders EIP project was launched last year with €25m funding from the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to tackle the complex causes behind the significant declines in breeding wader bird populations.
The organisation manages several sites to provide suitable habitats for waders, with nest protection officers trained to supervise areas of importance for the birds. It also works with landowners and farmers to implement protections on private property.
The team will use a thermal imagery drone to detect nests with curlew eggs, with help from the drone pilot team in the Hen Harrier Programme. After collection, the eggs are then transported to Fota for rearing.
“The staff of the Breeding Waders EIP, Fota Wildlife Park and the Hen Harrier Programme go to extraordinary lengths to make headstarting work in an Irish context,” said Owen Murphy, senior project manager at Breeding Waders EIP.
“Hopefully 2025 will be another successful and inspiring year, and that many new curlew will be in Irish skies this summer.”
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