Counting the Cost: Raising Curlew Chicks

Northern England holds some of the UK’s most important breeding grounds for Eurasian Curlew, notably in our uplands: the North Pennines, North York Moors, Yorkshire Dales and Cumbria.

Curlew populations have declined in recent years. A primary cause is chronically low breeding productivity - too few chicks fledge to sustain the population. Studies indicate that Curlew pairs are raising only about 0.2–0.3 chicks per pair on average, well below the ~0.43 chicks per pair needed for a stable population.

Predation on eggs and chicks by foxes, crows, and other predators is the chief culprit in breeding failure (often exacerbated by habitat changes). In one lowland England study, 19 monitored Curlew nests produced zero fledged chicks (all eggs/chicks were predated). This dire situation has made Curlew a high-priority species for conservation, spurring RSPB-led and partner interventions across northern England.

Conservation Schemes and Interventions in Northern England

RSPB-led projects in the north (often with government and landowner support) focused on improving breeding success on both upland farmland and moorland. Key initiatives include the RSPB’s Curlew Trial Management Project (a 5-year experiment at sites including RSPB Geltsdale in the North Pennines) and the EU-funded Curlew LIFE project (2020–2024) which had a focal landscape in Hadrian’s Wall–Geltsdale (Cumbria/Northumberland). These projects trial a “package” of interventions:

• Habitat management: Creating optimal nesting and chick-rearing habitat. This includes cutting or grazing rank vegetation (e.g. rush pasture) to create a mosaic of shorter and taller swards, restoring wet features (boggy flushes, damp meadows) for feeding, and even removing encroaching trees or plantations that harbour predators. The goal was to provide camouflage and food for chicks while minimizing cover for predators. In practice, this means mechanical rush-cutting, controlled grazing, re-wetting peatlands, delayed mowing of hay meadows, etc., across large acreages.

• Predator control: Lethal control of key predators (primarily foxes and carrion crows) under license, and sometimes fencing out predators. In northern uplands, this often requires hiring skilled gamekeepers or contractors to systematically reduce fox and crow numbers before and during the Curlew breeding season. Non-lethal measures such as electric fences around nests have also been tried in some areas (especially in NI and Wales) to keep predators away from eggs/chicks. Predator management was a “leading role” in the most successful Curlew LIFE site (Glenwherry, NI) where control intensity was “not far off grouse moor levels”.

• Monitoring and research: Intensive monitoring is integral and itself costly. Staff and volunteers locate nests, monitor outcomes, and often tag chicks (e.g. with radio transmitters) to track survival and causes of mortality. Motion-sensitive cameras may be deployed to identify nest predators. This monitoring not only measures success (productivity) but also informs adaptive management (e.g. guiding where to focus predator control or habitat tweaks). It’s labour-intensive: e.g. RSPB’s Curlew LIFE teams radio-tagged chicks to learn that many were lost to predation at night, informing more targeted fox control.

Together, these interventions form a comprehensive conservation package deployed on focal sites in northern England (often RSPB reserves or partnership land). Such efforts have shown some promising results. For instance, the RSPB Curlew LIFE project reports an “upward trend” in Curlew chick fledge numbers over 4 years across its UK sites.

However, outcomes in England have been mixed. At the Geltsdale/Hadrian’s Wall site (~15,000 ha, ~220 breeding pairs), 22 Curlew chicks fledged in 2023 - an improvement from previous years but still only ~0.22 chicks per pair (below the target productivity).

In contrast, where predator control was extremely intensive (e.g. Glenwherry, NI, outside England), Curlew LIFE recorded 202 chicks fledged over 4 years, with a 40% increase in breeding pairs in one year. This demonstrates that high investment can yield dramatic gains.

On well-managed lowland sites in northern England, similarly high success has been documented: for example, at the Lower Derwent Valley NNR (North Yorkshire) in 2018, 46 chicks fledged from 69 pairs (≈0.67 chicks/pair) after large-scale habitat and predator management. This productivity level exceeded the threshold for population growth. These successes underscore that Curlew declines can be reversed locally, but only with major intervention.

Breakdown of Conservation Costs

Conservation interventions for Curlew are resource-intensive and northern England’s landscapes pose particular challenges (large, remote upland areas with dispersed Curlew pairs). Key cost components include:

• Habitat management costs: Upland habitat work is laborious. Cutting hectares of rush by machine or hand, creating scrapes or pools, managing grazing, etc. According to RSPB research, habitat management in their Curlew trial sites cost around £135 per hectare per year. This figure encompasses activities like mowing, scrub removal, and peatland restoration on farmland or moorland. For perspective, treating ~1,000 ha (10 km²) of farmland for Curlews would cost on the order of £135,000 annually in habitat work. These costs can cover contractor fees, machinery use, and payments to farmers for modified practices. (By comparison, a typical agri-environment payment for rush pasture management might be on the order of a few tens of £/ha – often insufficient to cover the real costs without extra project funding.)

• Predator control costs: Keeping fox and crow numbers down over large areas is equally costly. RSPB’s trial indicated ~£21.6 per hectare per year for predator control efforts. This involves hiring experienced controllers (or gamekeepers) to systematically trap/shoot predators across the site and surrounding buffer. For 1,000 ha, that’s ~£21,600 per year. Notably, this level of effort must be sustained annually and timed precisely to protect nests. Even with such cost, success is not guaranteed – if neighbouring land has high predator densities, continual reinvasion can occur. RSPB scientists emphasize that national-scale Curlew recovery will require “enormous” investment, in part because effective predator reduction must cover huge swaths of the landscape. (It’s worth noting that on private grouse moors in the northern uplands, effective predator control is already conducted by gamekeepers for shooting interests. This has had the side effect of maintaining Curlew populations at no cost to the public purse. However, the RSPB acknowledge that replicating this effort across non-sporting landscapes would require significant public funding.)

• Monitoring and staffing: While often not itemised in per-hectare figures, a substantial portion of project budgets goes to employing conservation officers, ecologists, and volunteers’ expenses to carry out the above work and monitoring. This includes field equipment (vehicles, ATVs, cameras, radio-tags) and survey time. For example, the EU LIFE Curlew project had a total budget of ~€5.15 million over 4 years, covering five sites and a large team. Understandably several tens of thousands of pounds per site per year go toward monitoring and coordination. These costs, while indirect, are crucial for ensuring interventions are properly targeted and evaluated (e.g. determining if chicks are actually fledging and which predators are most problematic).

• Nest protection measures: In some trials, predator-exclusion fencing around individual nests or small nesting areas has been used. This involves materials (electric fencing, posts, netting) and regular maintenance. Adding electric fences around dozens of nests can quickly add a few thousand pounds in equipment and labour. RSPB notes that in places like Wales and Northern Ireland, adding nest fencing on top of habitat & predator management showed early signs of boosting success. However, fencing every nest in a large landscape is often impractical; it tends to be used in smaller, lowland sites or as a demonstration.

• Specialized interventions (headstarting): Although not widely used in northern England to date, “headstarting” (captive-rearing chicks from wild eggs) has been trialled in the UK (e.g. a Natural England-led project in eastern England). This is extremely expensive per chick. For instance, an East Anglian headstarting project that took eggs from airfields and reared chicks in captivity cost an estimated £20,000–£30,000 of public money per curlew chick reared when all expenses were tallied. Headstarting involves building facilities and biosecurity measures – essentially a last-resort method. It has not been a focus of RSPB’s northern England work (which has prioritized in situ habitat and predator management), but it illustrates the upper end of what a fledged curlew can cost.

Summary

The annual management cost per site in northern England can easily run into hundreds of thousands of pounds when combining habitat work and predator control over large upland areas. For example, an RSPB trial site of ~10 km² incurred roughly £156,000 per year on these direct interventions alone (not counting overheads and monitoring).

Such expenditures reflect the challenging reality of Curlew conservation – working at landscape scale and addressing predation is expensive. The RSPB say scaling this up across all of northern England’s Curlew range would require very large funding streams.

Productivity Outcomes and Success Rates

The return on these investments can be measured in productivity (chicks fledged per pair). Northern England projects have shown variable results:

• Without adequate intervention, productivity is near zero: As noted, many sites historically had virtually no chicks surviving. The Curlew’s decline has been attributed to “most cases breeding pairs failing to raise enough young”. In southern lowland England, a collation of 2018 data found 258 Curlew pairs produced only 40 fledged chicks in total – a catastrophic breeding failure overall. Northern England fared a bit better, especially on game keepered uplands, but still generally <0.3 chicks/pair in unmanaged areas.

• Habitat & predator management can improve success: RSPB’s Curlew Trial Management Project (which combined rush cutting and predator removal) found that Curlew nest success improved relative to untreated reference sites, though chick survival remained a challenge. Predator control is known to dramatically boost wader breeding success: a review showed that removing foxes and crows led to a three-fold increase in the breeding success of ground-nesting birds like Curlew, Lapwing, and Golden Plover. This is borne out by practical results on grouse moors - Curlew breeding success and densities are significantly higher on grouse-managed moors (with intensive predator control) than on nearby unmanaged land. In Northern Ireland’s Glenwherry uplands (Curlew LIFE site), the intensive efforts yielded an average of ~50 chicks fledging per year (as noted, 202 chicks over 4 years) and even population growth within the project span – a remarkable turnaround attributable to strong predator suppression and habitat tweaks.

• Examples from northern England: On RSPB’s Geltsdale and Hadrian’s Wall site in northern England, after applying the full suite of measures, 22 chicks fledged from ~99 monitored pairs in 2023. This equates to ~0.22 chicks per pair – still below the ~0.4 target, but an improvement from the near-zero fledging that occurred before intervention. It suggests that while predator control and habitat work helped, predation and other losses continued to limit chick output. The RSPB noted that even with these efforts, Curlew recovery is “no mean feat” and requires long-term continuity).

In contrast, the Lower Derwent Valley (Yorkshire) example shows what’s achievable in a well-managed lowland floodplain: 46 chicks fledged from 20 successful nests (out of 69 pairs) in one season. That is ~0.67 chicks/pair – exceeding the sustainability threshold. The reserve’s manager attributed this to controlling land management over a large area, demonstrating high productivity when conditions are ideal.

These outcomes highlight that success rates vary widely. In northern England uplands, even after considerable effort, chick productivity might hover in the 0.2–0.4 range (as long as some predators remain or unfavourable weather), whereas in a few best-case scenarios it can reach 0.5–0.7 per pair. The implication for cost-effectiveness is that the cost per chick can swing dramatically based on how many chicks fledge.

Cost per Fledged Chick - Estimates and Range

Although conservation organizations don’t typically advertise “cost per chick” as a metric, we have approximated it by dividing project expenditures by chicks produced. In northern England RSPB-supported schemes, the cost of a single fledged Curlew chick is on the order of thousands of pounds. A reasonable estimate (with many caveats) would be in the £5,000–£10,000 per chick range under current upland schemes. This is derived as follows:

• From intervention cost per area: As noted, managing ~1,000 ha might cost ~£156k/year for habitat + predator work. If that area holds ~50 breeding pairs (a density not unusual in upland fringe farmland) and achieves, say, 0.3 chicks/pair, that’s ~15 chicks – equating to ~£10,400 per chick. If productivity improved to 0.5 chicks/pair (25 chicks), cost per chick would be ~£6,240. In a poorer outcome year (0.1 chicks/pair, perhaps only 5 chicks), it would skyrocket to ~£31k per chick. So £5–10k is a mid-range for moderate success scenarios in large upland sites. For example, using the Geltsdale 2023 result: ~15,000 ha site, ~22 chicks fledged – even if only a portion of that area was actively managed, the estimate is similar, several thousand pounds spent per chick).

• Headstarting and intensive cases: In special cases like the East Anglian headstarting project, costs were much higher – £20–30k per chick released – because of the hands-on rearing expenses. This represents the upper extreme of cost per chick. Such an approach in northern England’s context would likely be similarly expensive.

• Lower-cost scenarios: Conversely, on grouse moors or certain reserves where predator control is already in place, the marginal cost to “produce” Curlew chicks can be low. Gamekeepers controlling predators for Red Grouse do so as part of their job – Curlew chicks fledged there might be seen as costing £0 of public money (though private estate expenditures cover it). The  paradox that wild Curlew chicks on gamekeepered moors cost nothing to produce, yet elsewhere we spend heavily to rear chicks – underlining an efficiency gap.

The Lower Derwent example likely had relatively low cost-per-chick as well, since many chicks fledged. If that NNR spent (hypothetically) tens of thousands on management and got 46 chicks, the cost/chick could be on the order of only £1–2k. This shows that economies of scale kick in with higher productivity: the more chicks each pair fledges, the more “efficient” each pound spent becomes in terms of output.

In summary, RSPB scientists caution that these interventions are “not cheap” and scaling them up across Curlew’s range will require great investment for relatively modest gains.

Indeed, about £23 million/year is already paid through UK agri-environment schemes for wader-friendly habitat management, yet without predator control the return on this investment is poor in terms of chicks. Introducing comprehensive predator management into public schemes would raise costs further. Any economic efficiency analysis must therefore weigh that preventing Curlew extinction will inevitably be expensive.

Estimate: If driven grouse shooting ceased, we estimate, using RSPB data that the cost of replacing lost curlew chicks in northern England would be £5,000–£10,000 per fledged chick in northern England under current RSPB-supported conservation models, with a broader possible range from under £1k (in best-case scenarios) up to ~£20k+ (in intensive or poor-success scenarios).

Conclusion

Conservationists are spending thousands of pounds for each additional Curlew chick. These costs come from habitat management, predator control, and monitoring - all necessary components to give Curlews a fighting chance. The productivity gains achieved (e.g., tripling or more of fledging rates with full intervention on a grouse moor) show that money can buy success, but sustaining and scaling such efforts is challenging. The RSPB and partners stress that adequate funding (through agri-environment schemes or LIFE-style projects) is crucial going forward.

However, it is important to recognise that gamekeepers on driven grouse moors protect an estimated 53% of the English Curlew population, at no cost to the public. Without them this essential conservation work would need to be funded by taxpayers - and the challenge becomes even more costly and difficult to overcome.

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