A View from the Angus Glens - by Bruce Cooper

Bruce Cooper speaks to attendees at a wader conservation meeting in Angus during March this year.

Throughout “Wader Week” 2025, I’d like to celebrate the work of a group of Angus farmers who are pulling together in order to reverse the decline of wading bird populations in their area.

The West Angus Wader Community has been running since spring 2023, originally funded by NatureScot, and supported by the Working for Waders project. I have been fortunate to help the group in the role of part-time facilitator, having worked in the area man-and-boy as gamekeeper, head keeper and estate manager, and now as a specialist land management consultant, and so have known many of the people involved for a number of years.

 The West Angus Wader Community is a collaboration of around 25 farmers, landowners, land managers and community members (including businesses and one of the local schools) working with one common goal, the conservation of the county’s wading birds. If you were to draw a boundary around the land over which the various members operate (and others in between), it would encompass an area of around 150 km2, including some lowground with arable cropping, lots of in-bye or marginal grassland, and a good chunk of heather hill.

 This area has long been blessed with good numbers of waders, benefitting from the grouse moors and traditional farming methods that greatly influenced the landscape in the past and is still something of a ‘hotspot’ for many wader species. Curlew, Lapwing, Oystercatchers, Redshank and Golden Plover continue to return to the Angus glens in spring to nest and rear their young, but this is an increasingly difficult task as agriculture has become more intensive and land use in some areas has changed dramatically, removing suitable habitat, not to mention the ever-increasing list of predators the birds have to contend with.

 But there is hope. In a variety of ways, our enthusiastic community is working hard with limited resources to help breeding waders. Like the plough man of old, farmers with eyes like hawks and senses of a heavy plough horse are leaving their tractor seats to move Lapwing eggs out of harm’s way whilst sowing spring crops. One farmer delayed the cultivating of a fodder rape stubble and abandoned rolling grass because there were a number of Lapwing nesting in the fields, whilst another landowner delayed mowing grassland because there were a couple of Oystercatcher broods in the area. These small actions may not sound like much, but they can have a huge impact on the success of birds in the area – the more people are able to operate in the same careful manner, the more birds will successfully raise chicks.

 Also, we are working closely with some ex-gamekeepers who are using their skills and experience to help reduce the number of some of the common predators in the area, principally foxes, corvids and stoats. Given that the evidence shows how big an impact these predators currently have on breeding waders across the country, this is a crucial part of our work and something we hope to expand if future funding allows.

 And it’s not just the land managers who are engaging. Office staff in a local industrial estate watch over Oystercatcher’s eggs like a mother watches a child, while gym users discuss the latest sightings of adults and chicks.

 Recently, as part of a Dundee University project, we installed an acoustic monitor at Isla primary school after seeing Oystercatchers setting up territory on the school roof. Now, the children can easily keep up with the birds’ activity by checking the latest records on their computers. Similar devices have also been deployed across parts of the project area to help with general monitoring efforts, as even with our dedicated volunteers, together we can only monitor a small proportion of the wader population that we have.

 And monitoring is important. Across the area we try to encourage people to be mindful of their waders and to manage their ground sympathetically where possible. We hold events, like the one this March funded by NatureScot and by kind invitation of Antony Gifford of Kinnordy estate, where the group met to discuss habitat management and predator control methods. However, a crucial part of any such engagement is to try to show how the birds are responding, as this can make positive changes very real and rewarding for those putting in the hard work to make it happen and so encourage them to continue to do so. Between various members of the community and myself, we have found and monitored over 100 nests each year, although this number varies depending on the funding available to support nest-finding activities.

 There is lots happening within the community and we have grand plans for the future. As well as the involvement of Dundee University, I have also started working with Glasgow University to try to improve our monitoring of wader productivity by ringing chicks. We are also liaising with another wader project currently running on one of the Angus estates to see where we might collaborate, and we hope to have university students conduct a variety of projects each year, which will greatly help our understanding of what is happening in the area. More people join our community periodically, offering expanding opportunities to change the way the landscape is managed and benefit more breeding waders, and we are actively seeking funding to allow us to better engage with this ever-increasing community and to better monitor the waders they manage.

Bruce Cooper

Facilitator, West Angus Wader Community