It’s that time of year again, the waders are returning to Auchnerran, our Scottish demonstration farm.
First, we started to see the lapwing drifting back, hearing that famous peewit call drifting over the fields. Then our new shepherd Dyfan and farm administrator Bronté had the unique pleasure of being woken up in the night to the sound of piping oystercatchers. Soon after, our placement student Adam spotted curlew flying overhead, ready to return to nest here for another year.
The return of the waders signals the start of our busiest period on the farm, as we get prepared for another year of monitoring and studying their nesting season. With this we have begun our pre-breeding wader counts, and on just our third. count have already recorded 164 individual lapwing. This is substantially more than we have recorded on these counts in the last two years and hopefully suggests we’ll have more nests and, with a bit more luck, more fledged chicks. As well as this, we recently counted 106 curlew in a single large group nearby, so remain hopeful that the area will have more nesting curlew contributing to the adult population.
This is an exciting year for wader research at Auchnerran, as we aim to expand upon all areas of our research to date. This includes colour ringing more wader chicks and expanding our monitoring, including more investigations into the predators on site. We hope this research will further contribute to the ongoing conservation of these species and help preserve our iconic waders, so future generations still get the joy of waking up in the night to piping oystercatchers.