British moorland can support important populations of breeding waders, gamebirds and birds of prey, underlining its conservation value. Moorland and associated habitats are a result of management, in particular for sheep grazing and sport shooting of Red Grouse. Moorland conservation may additionally be shaped by financial payments made through agri-environment or similar schemes, using management prescriptions to maintain, restore or enhance particular components. While a suite of such prescriptions have been taken up quite widely, an ongoing decline of moorland birds is amongst the more marked results of the 2007-11 Bird Atlas. BTO researchers, with collaborators from ADAS UK and the former Scottish Coal, have just reported on a ten-year monitoring programme set up to examine the effectiveness of moorland management in south-west Scotland. Management prescriptions advocated widely as best practice for moorland birds began at the site within the Muirkirk and North Lowther Uplands SPA (Special Protection Area) in 2002. These included including muirburn and cutting, grazing, legal predator control and the restoration of hydrological features. Annual surveys of vegetation and birds were carried out to assess responses to these prescriptions. For birds, comparisons were made against trends for moorland habitats derived from the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS), which accounted for factors such as weather that have a marked effect on moorland bird populations. The expectation that the breeding bird community would increase in response to the management prescriptions adopted was not fulfilled. Only two species increased relative to the general trend for moorland and one of them was Carrion Crow, a species that was being actively removed as part of predation control measures. Most species showed no change or actually declined. Although the responses by vegetation to changes in grazing were quite small, moorland habitat condition did appear to have stabilized and further degradation halted. More relevant, however, was that declines in populations were common across species with different habitat associations, and so a causal relationship with the management changes appeared unlikely. Similarly an effect of disturbance was unlikely, but it remained plausible that the failure to effectively control predators could have contributed to the failure to achieve the principal objective of increasing breeding bird populations. Although based on monitoring the effects of management prescriptions rather than a controlled experimental design, this work highlights the difficulties in establishing effective management regimes for the benefit of moorland birds. It also underlines a need to develop an improved understanding of the factors that shape moorland bird communities more widely. Raising the question as to whether moorland bird conservation can be effective where they remain vulnerable to predation, it will contribute towards the wider debate on the future of British uplands.

The Uists in the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides) are home to a rare habitat known as “machair”, which is a vegetated plain of calcareous shell-sand. This habitat grades into acidic peat-based moorland, creating a unique complex of habitats consisting of dunes, pasture, cultivated sandy plains, damp grassland, wet marsh and emergent loch-edge vegetation. Collectively these habitats support exceptionally large breeding populations of waders, particularly Dunlin, Lapwing, Redshank, Ringed Plover, Oystercatcher and Snipe. There is strong evidence that egg losses to Hedgehogs, which were introduced in the 1970s, have been responsible for declines in some of these populations. However, declines in, for example, Dunlin and Ringed Plover have been recorded in areas not colonised by Hedgehogs, and some increases since 2000 have occurred in breeding wader species at sites known to support high numbers of Hedgehogs, suggesting other factors might also be at play. A new study by the BTO and the James Hutton Institute investigated the role of changes in vegetation and agricultural practices using data spanning three decades from breeding wader and vegetation surveys, along with interviews with local land managers to assess trends in land-use. Numbers of Oystercatcher and Redshank have increased during this time, while those of Dunlin and Ringed Plover have fallen, and Lapwing has remained stable. There were also changes to machair cultivation - the area of land cultivated was the same, but the habitat mosaic created had become simpler and more homogeneous, with deeper ploughing and a greater reliance on inorganic fertilizers instead of the traditional practice of using seaweed. Reductions in Dunlin and Ringed Plover were smallest where soil fertility and machair cultivation had changed the least. Reduced soil fertility is generally associated with a loss in macro-invertebrates, which could affect the availability of prey favoured by these species. In contrast, Oystercatcher numbers rose on less fertile soils, and it is possible that this species is benefitting from an increase in earthworms brought about by greater agricultural intensification. Decreasing soil moisture and increasing soil salinity also appear to have negative effects on some wader species. The next important step in understanding the drivers behind the changes in the breeding wader populations should include an examination of the interaction between vegetation changes, disturbance and predation pressures exerted not only by Hedgehogs but by Common Gulls, corvids, raptors and mustelids as well. This could be achieved by experimental manipulation in order to simulate possible management scenarios, and would inform how to conserve these nationally important breeding wader populations.