Wader breeding season is in full swing at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s demonstration farm in Aberdeenshire and lapwing, oystercatcher and curlew chicks are hatching across the fields.
Out of Doors presenter Mark Stephen last visited the farm back in January to find out about the landscape-scale approach to farming and conservation which is helping our ground-nesting wader species thrive here.
However predation is a constant threat to them and new methods of protecting them are being trialled at Auchnerran.
GWCT’s researcher Max Wright showed Mark how protection cages work, and how they are designed to protect the nests and eggs from both mammalian predators, such as badgers and foxes, and corvids.
Listen back to the full report on BBC iPlayer – it starts at 12-minutes in.
Auchnerran is an upland hill farm which aims to show how hill edge, marginal farmland can be managed to benefit both game and wildlife. It has a healthy wader population, but one that has been hard hit by badger predation. The farm is currently one of a number of trial sites that the cages are being used at.