A FIVE-YEAR project to test measures designed to halt the decline of the lapwing begins today.
More than 250 farmers have signed up to the scheme, which scientists from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds hope will identify how best to save the green plovers, which make a “pee-wit” call.
Lapwing numbers have slumped in the past decade — more than a fifth of the population has disappeared — and the Government is under pressure to give them special protection. Since 1970 numbers have fallen by almost half. Changes in farming techniques have been blamed because they have deprived the bird of suitable habitat. The loss of mixed agriculture and land drainage have been particularly damaging.
Three types of land management will be monitored on upland farms. On one group of farms, measures acknowledged to be environmentally beneficial, such as ditch-digging and field-wetting, will be implemented. The measures qualify for the Government’s environmental farming payments.
The second set will use techniques ignored by government officials administering payments for environmental schemes. The third set will be a control group.
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The farms are in the Peak District in Derbyshire, the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, the North Pennines, southeastern Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Mark Bolton, a biologist with the RSPB, said: “We’re aiming to show whether the UK’s agri-environment schemes will increase lapwing numbers or whether extra measures are needed to ensure the right habitat is created. Lapwings are primarily farmland birds and only a fraction of the UK’s lapwing population breed on nature reserves.”
Gavin Thomas, an RSPB worker in Lancashire, said: “Lapwings are declining so we need to safeguard the birds we have and increase their numbers in the hope that they will spread. The recovery project should reveal just how we can do that.”
Simon Stott, who farms in South Bowland, where lapwings, a farmer’s friend that eats invertebrates, are known as chewits, has signed up for the initiative. He said: “The lapwings eat the flukeworm, which would otherwise cause disease in my sheep.”