Survival of Eurasian Curlews


There have been many references on the Curlewcall website to the Curlews colour-ringed on the Severn estuary at Wibdon in Gloucestershire between 2010 and 2013 by a team led by Dave Coker and Steve Dodd. The monitoring of these colour-ringed birds has been carried out by a number of volunteers, of whom John Sanders has been by far the most active. Several papers have now appeared in which John has written up the results, sometimes in conjunction with ornithologists from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and the British Trust for Ornithology. The first (published in Ringing and Migration 32, pages 58-62 in 2017) dealt with ‘Problems with multiple colour rings on Curlews’. The second, published with Eileen Rees of WWT in Wildfowl 68, pages 155-171 (2018), dealt with arrival and departure patterns of these Curlews on their wintering grounds.

A third paper, this time on the survival of this wintering group of adult Curlews, has now appeared (jointly authored by John, Eileen Rees and Rob Robinson of BTO) in the latest edition of Wader Study, the journal of the International Wader Study Group (IWSG). The full article is available now to members of the IWSG, and open access will be available after two years. The editors of the journal have given permission for the following link, which takes readers to a summary of the article, to be posted on the Curlewcall website:

https://www.waderstudygroup.org/article/13399/

One Curlew specialist comments that this paper gives further support to the idea that the reason for the decline of the Curlew is not failure in the survival of adults, but rather the inability to produce enough chicks.

Mike Smart

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