The Badger and the Lapwing

The Badger shuffles under the old wooden gate and into the field. You hear the scraping whine of the Lapwing alarm calls, and through your night vision scope you see birds nervously twitching their necks. The males are up and away to the next field. The females hop off the nests, call anxiously, then take flight too. Perhaps the Badger will run straight past the nests on its nightly commute, or perhaps it will happen upon an easy meal - they don't often seem to search for nests in the same way that foxes might, but when they're snuffling for earthworms if they bump into a nest they'll eat it. The Lapwing might renest, or that might be the year gone right there.

A Badger predating a Lapwing nest in the Yorkshire Dales.

As a society, we have an important decision to make as you watch through that night vision scope - we license the lethal control of some species for conservation purposes, and others, like Badgers, we don't. Badgers are subject to a high level of legal protection following their long history of persecution, but since the Badger Act in 1992, populations have rebounded to the extent that in many areas they are thought to be much more abundant than Foxes (which are lethally controlled for conservation purposes on nature reserves and the wider countryside). It's challenging to unravel the specific impacts that individual predator species have on ground-nesting bird breeding productivity, and it's likely to vary significantly in different areas, but we do know that where nest cameras have been used to monitor wader nests, Badger predation can be non-trivial.

From the late 1990s onwards, at lowland wet grassland nature reserves across the UK where habitats are managed for breeding waders, we went through a process of observing very low breeding productivity, investigating the causes with nest cameras, and responding in most cases by installing electrified predator exclusion fences to prevent Badgers, Foxes and Mustelids from predating nests. However, the costs of installing and maintaining predator-proof fencing are such that it is not a feasible option for mitigating wader declines in the wider countryside.

When I first began working on ground-nesting birds with farmers and landowners in the wider countryside, I was given guidance on how to best to brush off the concerns of landowners, farmers and gamekeepers who would, it was presumed, collar me with their views about how predation was causing declines in ground-nesting birds. In spite of the fact that by then on many nature reserves mammalian predators had been effectively excluded to prevent them predating nests, the conservation sector still struggled to acknowledge that predation was driving declines of many ground-nesting birds in the wider countryside - to do so would have been seen to give succour to shooting interests. And so as a naïve bird surveyor without any great understanding of the accumulating evidence on predation, nor what it might feel like to repeatedly have legitimate concerns dismissed, I often found myself dismissing stories about predation I was told without any great surplus of diplomacy or empathy.

How the conservation sector responds to concerns about the effects of generalist predators matters: convincing farmers, gamekeepers or land managers to gather evidence on bird populations or manage habitats to benefit species becomes much more challenging if we aren't also willing to listen to their experiences. And we must be able to accept and openly discuss the contradictions in how we legislate lethal control for conservation purposes with people of different perspectives - it's not any great secret that there's now little conservation, moral or animal welfare justification for treating Badgers and Foxes so differently. It's also no great secret that if we intend to make a serious attempt to hold on to breeding waders in farmed landscapes, then there is little logic to investing large amounts of money in habitat management knowing that the effectiveness of that investment could be compromised if Badger predation were to severely limit productivity with no recourse to management.

Of course, were legislation to change so that you could pull the trigger on that Badger, there would be objections - "isn't that just choosing one protected species over another!" But, there are no conservation interventions which don't result in costs and benefits for individuals or species across taxonomic levels - whenever we intervene to conserve one species or group of species, we do so at the expense of others that would have benefited from a status quo or a different type of management. Prioritising between species is what conservation is - we couldn't intervene to conserve anything if we weren't willing to trade-off between the interests of species, animal communities or habitats. When we clear Birch trees encroaching on a reedbed, we prioritise Bitterns and Bearded Reedlings over Willow Warblers and Dunnocks. Even if we imagine the fight against semi-natural habitat being lost to development, at any one time there will hundreds of proposed developments on the desk of the environmental NGO - they will have the resources to fight one in a hundred of these developments - so again they have to prioritise between the relative conservation significance of the species affected in each situation.

So you stare once more at that Badger ambling towards Lapwing nests through your night vision scope. Perhaps you'll have to wait a little longer while we ponder how to prioritise between a much-loved, widespread, increasing species and a suite of rapidly declining species for which our existing interventions are failing. Or perhaps we'll choose to communicate robustly about the difficult realities of conservation and put in place a legislative framework that facilitates management of Badgers in contexts where they are negatively impacting ground-nesting birds. And, perhaps next time someone comes and proposes some bit of habitat management or bird monitoring on your ground, you'll have no need to respond: "but there's no point if we can't do anything about Badgers."