This is the first of two blog posts about the IWSG conference, read the second post by Mary Colwell about her talk.
The International Wader Study Group (IWSG) is the principal European organisation dedicated to waders; the American counterpart is the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN).
IWSG was established some 50 years ago, mainly by British wader enthusiasts (many of them in the early days involved in catching and ringing waders, especially on The Wash), and now has a distinctly European make-up, with an aspiration to become genuinely worldwide, reaching out in particular to the flyway organisations covering the Afro-Eurasian, Central Asian and East Asian-Australasian flyways under the Convention on Migratory Species.
The main IWSG activities are publication three times a year of the Wader Study Bulletin and holding an annual meeting. The annual meetings (which usually last two or three days) are an occasion for wader fieldworkers and scientists (the terms are not mutually exclusive!) to get together, hear presentations and to exchange stories and reminiscences.
Mary and I attended the 2019 meeting at Morecambe Bay, Mary attended the 2023 Meeting in Sylt on the German Wadden Sea, and we both attended this year’s meeting at Montpellier in Mediterranean France.
Mary (after a striking presentation in last year’s meeting on “Ecological Grief” which had half the room in tears) gave a talk in this year’s opening session on the need for crisis leadership in conservation to meet the situation we are in, citing two different forms of leadership - Ernest Shackleton and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.
The meeting was organised with the support of the French governmental Office National de la Biodiversité; 170 participants, mostly European, some Asian, very few African, many of them Ph.D. students presenting their work, but many old hands from the past, who had been going to these meetings for many years.
There was not a huge emphasis on Curlews in this year's presentations (compared to previous years):
- Interesting new note on small numbers of Curlews and Black-tailed Godwits, marked with satellite tags in Bangladesh in winter, moving over the Hindu Kush at 6,000 metres to reach breeding areas in western Asia. What does this say about these birds’ physiology?
- Presentation by Gwenael Quintaine of Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO, the BirdLife partner in France) on recoveries of tagged Curlews wintering on the Atlantic coast of France and recovered in Russia, well to the east of most recoveries in northwest Europe.
- Preliminary presentation by Harry Ewing from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) on how far people have got with head-starting, concentrating mainly on UK and Polish work. A prelude to the CA webinar on this subject on 6-7 February 2025
- Presentation by Katharine Bowgen (BTO) on her work tracking tagged breeding Curlews in the Yorkshire dales to find more about their habitat preferences.
- Preliminary presentation from Alex Nicol-Harper from Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) on whether translocation of head-started Curlews is effective.
Outside these Curlew talks I thought there were three highlights:
One of the few North American participants was Paul Smith, the successor in the Canadian Wildlife Service to the late, great Hugh Boyd. Paul explained that the reason for the limited North American participation was that the American WHSRN meeting had taken place only a few weeks previously. BUT he emphasised very strongly that 50% of the WHSRN presentations had begun by showing the same graph, which noted that, of 37 North American wader species, only four had a positive situation (and Long-billed Curlew was not one of the 37 but was still threatened).
Most of the WHSRN talks had been concerned with how to react to the decrease, whereas he was surprised that so few of IWSG talks had dealt with conservation issues and dealt instead with research results and techniques. He referred to the (separate) science of Conservation Biology, which had grown up in the 1980s; he and WHSRN were promoting a “Road to Recovery” for waders and suggested that IWSG should do the same. Mary and I spent a long time talking to him; we are convinced that he has a great deal to teach Curlew Action and the Curlew Recovery Partnership.
Secondly, it seemed very clear that there are two main centres of European wader study and action: firstly Groningen (The Netherlands), around Professor Theunis Piersma, whom Mary and I visited on behalf of CA last year, and who has devoted his life to studies of waders (especially Black-tailed Godwit) and their movements, ecology and feeding requirements in the Wadden Sea, and has inspired others around the world to carry out similar studies; for example the Bangladesh studies were by his students; the dramatic problems of wetland loss in Doñana, Spain, (caused by illegal use of underground water resources for production of strawberries and other crops for the northern European market) were illustrated through their effect on Black-tailed Godwits.
His methods are also used with Icelandic Black-tailed Godwits of the Icelandic subspecies, many of which now winter in southwest England. The Bangladesh group have identified two new Asian subspecies of Black-tailed Godwit. The venue for next year’s IWSG meeting is not yet certain but is likely to be organized by Theunis on the Wadden Sea (recently declared a World Heritage site, like the Yellow Sea mudflats in China). It is hoped that the meeting may be held in a building celebrating World Heritage status on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog.
The other hotspot of wader research and conservation is La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast, where university scientists under Pierrick Bocher (who studied with Theunis) lead a team of researchers and reserve managers round the major French reserves on the Charente bay, with support from LPO whose national headquarters are also at La Rochelle.
Pierrick made an authoritative presentation on the importance of the French shoreline for waders, under the Monty Python-esque title of “Now for something slightly different”; he also noted the importance of cultural issues, pointing out that the number of French hunters had decreased from two to one million, but that hunting had been an important part of French culture since the Revolution, considered as the spur to allowing all Frenchmen (and not just the aristocracy) to hunt.
There were many presentations from the La Rochelle team (several of whom came to the CA fieldworkers’ meeting at King’s Lynn last February); they are a key source for scientific knowledge, for influencing official French hunting policy and for gaining information on the breeding Curlews of northeast Europe, many of which winter on the French Atlantic coast.
Finally, as always in conferences, some of the most useful sessions were the pauses and discussions outside the formal meeting, where we made a variety of contacts, notably for the upcoming CA webinar on 16 November on the 2024 Curlew breeding season in various countries of Europe.
We also made contacts with participants (among many) from Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine, all of whom were interested in the activities of Curlew Action. Few participants from Africa, other than Madagascar and the islands in the Indian Ocean (influence of Theunis again!).
Worth noting that the Central Asian Flyway Agreement was formally approved in Samarkand in February last and is now getting under way. This might be one way of developing contacts (together with informal links maintained by other participants) with Russian scientists, which we desperately need to find out more about the breeding Curlews of north-east Europe and northern Asia.
And a field trip to the nearby Camargue and the Tour du Valat Biological Station completed the session.
