By Mike Short, Head of Predation Management Research and Project Manager
Thanks to two years of funding through Natural England’s excellent Species Recovery Programme, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust has helped create a safer haven for beach-nesting birds on the North Solent National Nature Reserve in Hampshire. Our Gravelly Shores Project was born in 2023, and with Beaulieu Estate and the NNR reserve management team as project partners, together we’ve transformed a 1.7ha area of scrub-grassland into an open expanse of coastal vegetated shingle and this tailor-made ‘hotel for birds’ opened for business in March this year.
Judging by the numerous pairs of ringed plover, oystercatcher, little ringed plover and lapwing that nested on our new habitat this season, many of which fledged chicks, I think it’s fair to say this pioneering project has been a triumph, and we hope that in future years we’ll attract common terns and little terns to breed here too.
An oystercatcher incubates a nest made on the new shingle habitat. The electrified fence can be seen behind.
This gem of a reserve supports nationally important breeding aggregations of ringed plover and oystercatcher, which are also ‘designated features’ of the North Solent SSSI. Through our wader nest camera research we had previously recorded catastrophic losses of their nests to predators – mainly foxes, carrion crows and lesser black-backed gulls – and a contributory factor to the heavy losses was undoubtedly the high density of breeding pairs occupying a 2km long shingle spit, slowly being lost to the tide.
The coastal spit on the North Solent NNR is a critical breeding site for shorebirds but it is rapidly being lost to dynamic coastal processes largely driven by climate change.
Sea-level rise, coastal erosion and more frequent storm surges are devouring this linear shoreline, which is also ‘protected’ by a seasonally enforced Bird Sanctuary Order: the lack of human disturbance, coupled with a general paucity of suitable shingle nesting areas elsewhere in the Solent, encourages shingle-nesters to breed, but it remains a high-risk environment. When nesting birds aggregate in spatially restricted habitats like this, so predator impacts can be greater, as they can locate nests more efficiently, especially at high tide.
This case serves as an important reminder that although human disturbance can be a problem for ground-nesting birds, fundamentally it is predators that cause breeding failure by taking eggs and chicks. Reducing predation risk is therefore a critical component of population recovery. Experience tells us that this will necessitate a combination of lethal and non-lethal predation control methods, a topic that I will cover in a follow-on Gravelly Shores blog.
The project site was formerly acid grassland with gorse and bramble and grazed by ponies.
Our Gravelly Shores vision was to create a more climatically resilient stable shingle-nesting area using marine aggregates dredged from the Solent. To coax birds to nest here, this habitat had to be adjacent and functionally linked to the spit; and to the surrounding shoreline and saltmarsh environment which provides invertebrate-rich chick-rearing habitat. The shingle is encircled with an eight-strand electrified predator exclusion fence to help deter foxes and badgers, and to prevent nest interference and nest trampling by free-roaming ponies.
As it was being constructed the project site was split into various treatments to determine the best way of establishing shingle beaches above the intertidal zone. 10m square plots were incorporated to learn if beach-nesting birds favour particular substrates.
To our knowledge no one has ever constructed such a large shingle beach-nesting area for birds on what was effectively ‘farmland’, so we saw this as a golden opportunity to learn how to do this effectively and cost efficiently, to generate a blueprint for others to follow. To establish and maintain large open areas of shingle attractive to nesting shorebirds – especially terns – it is important to consider how best to manage vegetation that naturally colonises shingle.
Hence, we split the project site into different vegetation management treatments, which included plots with and without turf removal, herbicide use and with different depths of dredged sea ballast that we hypothesised might serve as a mulch to help suppress underlying vegetation. We also wanted to know if shingle-nesting birds preferentially select a particular type of substrate for nest-scraping, so we included 10m square plots top-dressed with one of five different types of marine substrate, which included cockleshells.
In year one, we saw a clear distinction in the vegetation community between treatment plots.
Already, we have seen stark differences in the extent of favourable and unfavourable vegetation across the various treatment areas. We will continue to monitor and manage plant life across the site and are encouraged that maritime species like yellow horned-poppy has already colonised.
An output of our project will be publication of a management guide on how to create shingle habitats for birds above the intertidal zone. Gravelly Shores has set a precedent; it will serve as a demonstration site for coastal wildlife managers to visit, and provide Natural England with further advice on how to deliver habitats to conserve beach-nesting birds.
The 1.7ha area of electric-fenced shingle habitat that we constructed (in the foreground) provides a safer and more climatically resilient nesting habitat for shorebirds.
Delivering a project of this nature and magnitude in a relatively short-space of time, required prioritisation of bird species of high conservation concern, over other habitats on this SSSI. Negotiations to get the greenlight to alter the existing landscape proved challenging, but we got there in the end and all credit to Natural England for letting our vision become a reality.
Gravelly Shores aimed to provide more resilient breeding habitat for ringed plovers and other beach-nesters. A follow-up blog will describe ancillary trials of non-lethal nest protection measures for ringed plovers and oystercatcher.
Currently, there are estimated to be fewer than 1,700 breeding pairs of ringed plover left in England. These delightful, charismatic beach-dwellers are red listed and their rapid demise is linked to on-going human impacts on the environment. Climate change, coastal squeeze and far too much anthropogenic food, which benefits common predators like foxes, carrion crows and gulls, are pushing ringed plovers and many other beach-nesters to the brink.
If we stand any chance of retaining biodiversity we must think big and outside the existing box, educate the masses and policy makers, and accept that controversial decision making at every level will be a necessary facet of achieving sustainable species recovery.