Nesting Temminck’s Stint – the smallest of the 22 wader species for which trends are reported
At the end of the summer, vast numbers of waders leave Norway, Sweden and Finland, heading southwest, south and south-east for the winter. In a 2019 paper by Lindström et al, we learn what is happening to these populations of Fennoscandian breeding species, as diverse as Temminck’s Stint and Curlew. The news for the period 2006 through to 2018 is basically pretty good – most populations have been stable and there are even some that have increased – but there are worrying signs for Broad-billed Sandpiper, Red-necked Phalarope and Whimbrel.
Breeding waders of Fennoscandia
As a volunteer taking part in the Breeding Bird Survey (BTO/JNCC/RSPB) in the UK, I feel that I do my bit to monitor what is happening to local bird population – providing counts that build into national trends. The work involved in delivering indices for breeding waders across the area of Fennoscandia shown in the map is in a different league. Here, counters visit habitats as diverse as forests, wetlands, mires and tundra, within the boreal and arctic areas of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Some survey sites are so remote that access requires the use of helicopters.
Fennoscandia provides important breeding areas for a large set of wader species, and models suggest that these habitats may be particularly vulnerable to climate change, especially increasing summer temperatures. The 2006-18 analysis in Wader Study, the journal of the International Wader Study Group, presents population trends for 22 wader species. The trends are based on 1,505 unique routes (6–8 km long), distributed over an area that’s about four times that of the United Kingdom.
The surveys took place across the whole of Norway and Finland, and in the northern two thirds of Sweden, between 58°N and 71°N, which largely coincides with the boreal, montane and arctic regions of Fennoscandia. The systematic distribution of these routes ensures that the main habitats in these countries are sampled in proportion to the area they cover. The paper describes the methodologies used in the three countries and the way that data were combined, especially factors used to translate sightings of individuals into ‘pair-equivalents’.
Overview of results
Looking at the results from across Norway, Sweden & Finland:
- In terms of pure numbers, Golden Plover was the most commonly encountered wader species, followed by Wood Sandpiper, Snipe, Greenshank and Green Sandpiper.
- The five most widespread species, seen on the highest number of routes, were Snipe, Green Sandpiper, Greenshank, Wood Sandpiper and Common Sandpiper.
- Wader species richness and the total number of wader pairs were both higher with increasing latitude; the median number of wader pairs per 10 km increased from just below 3 at latitudes 58–60°N, to just above 26 at latitudes 69–71°N.
- Using a multi-species indicator, the research team found no general change in wader numbers over the period 2006-18.
- The trends were significantly negative for three species: Red-necked Phalarope (-7.9% per year), Broad-billed Sandpiper (-5.4% per year) and Whimbrel (-1.3% per year).
- The trends were significantly positive for three species: Oystercatcher (+4.9% per year), Dunlin (+4.2% per year) and Wood Sandpiper (+0.8% per year).
- There was no significant trend for another 16 species for which encounters were deemed to be frequent enough for analysis.
- Population trends of long-distance migrants tended to be more negative than those of medium-distance migrants. This is discussed in detail in the paper.
Focusing on some key species
The Lindström et al paper is a tremendously rich source of information and references. Here are some species-specific highlights.
Oystercatcher. In the context of a species that is declining across NW Europe, the fact that there is a significant increase in Oystercatchers across Fennoscandia may be surprising. However, the authors note that there was a jump in numbers between 2006 and 2007 with little change since then.
Lapwing. The trends within the three Fennoscandian countries are very different. In Norway, there has been a dramatic decline (-15.2% per year during 2006–2018) and the Lapwing is now nearly extinct in many areas. The trend in Sweden is also significantly negative (-5.8% per year). In Finland, however, where the species is more widespread and numerous, there has been a strong increase (+5.9% per year) during the same period. See figure alongside.
Golden Plover. No significant change overall. There are some country-specific differences in trends, with a moderate decline in Norway being countered by a moderate increase in Sweden.
Snipe. The overall trend of this species for each country indicates an initial decline followed by an increase. A similar pattern has been noted in the UK’s Breeding Bird Survey over the same period.
Nesting Whimbrel
Woodcock. The trend for 2006–2018 is basically stable and similar in all three countries.
Curlew. There is no significant trend, overall, but populations in Norway and Sweden have declined at the same time that numbers in Finland have increased.
Whimbrel. Fennoscandian trend indicates a decline of 1.3 % per year. Whimbrel is doing poorly in Norway and Sweden but better in Finland.
Wood Sandpiper. This widespread species has increased slowly (0.8% per year), a trend that is largely driven by Norwegian and Swedish populations.
Wood Sandpiper was the second most commonly encountered wader
Redshank. The fact that no change was discernible, suggests that boreal and arctic populations are faring much better than the breeding populations further south in Europe. For example, see Redshank – warden of the marsh.
Redshank – more obvious than most breeding waders encountered!
Spotted Redshank. The estimated annual decline for Spotted Redshank is 2.8% per year but the species is too thinly spread for this to provide significant evidence of a decline. This rate is very similar to the recent drop in the Wetland Bird Survey index in the UK. See Fewer Spotted Redshanks.
Broad-billed Sandpiper. This species has the second most negative trend among the 22 species analysed (-5.6% per year). The bulk of information comes from Finland where the trend is even more negative (-7.5% per year). Birds head southeast in the autumn to countries bordering the Indian Ocean – areas for which winter trend data are not available. The species is still considered to be of ‘least concern’ but perhaps this designation may need to be revisited?
Dunlin. Breeding birds in the survey area are largely of the alpina race. The overall trend is significantly positive (+4.1% per year), which is in sharp contrast to the strong declines of the schinzii subspecies that breeds around the Baltic Sea, western Finland and further south and west in Europe.
Ruff. There were major declines in the period immediately prior to this review (Lindström et al. 2015) but changes reported here are lower (-2.3% per year) and the decline is not statistically significant.
Red-necked Phalarope. The authors write, “This species has the most negative trend of all the 22 species [-7.9% per year], with most data coming from Sweden. We do not know the cause of this decline but, given that this species shares its south-eastern migration route with Broad-billed Sandpiper, whose population exhibits the second largest decline, the relevant problems might largely apply somewhere along the migration routes”.
Link to Britain & Ireland
As shown in Which wader when and why? there are strong migratory connections between Fennoscandia and the British Isles. Some waders, such as Green, Common and Wood Sandpipers, pass through on their way south in the autumn, whilst many more fly here for the winter, to take advantage of the warmer maritime climate.
Three wader species with particularly strong links between Fennoscandia and Britain & Ireland are still shot and eaten in these islands. Each autumn, large numbers of Woodcock, Golden Plover and Snipe cross the North Sea. It is difficult to ascertain figures for the number that are shot but there is agreement that the vast majority are winter visitors, as opposed to native birds. The results presented in the paper suggest that there have been no discernible changes in the Fennoscandian populations of these three game species in the period 2006-18. Two earlier WaderTales blogs focus on Woodcock and Snipe in Britain & Ireland:
There has been no significant change in Golden Plover numbers across Fennoscandia
Two WaderTales blogs about wintering waders in Great Britain and the island of Ireland were published in 2019, based on reviews in British Birds and Irish Birds. These were Do population estimates matter? and Ireland’s wintering waders. The six big losers, in terms of wintering numbers in these islands, were Knot, Oystercatcher, Redshank, Curlew, Grey Plover and Dunlin. Knot arrive from Greenland and Canada, with Grey Plover flying from Russia, but it is interesting to think about this Fennoscandian breeding analysis in the context of winter losses of the other four species.
- Wintering numbers of Oystercatchers have dropped recently in Britain and in Ireland. The population is made up of migrants from Iceland (more about this here), very large numbers from Norway, birds that stay within the British Isles and smaller numbers from other European and Scandinavian countries. Given there is no discernible decline in Fennoscandia, it seems likely that much of the decline can be attributed to a major fall in Scottish breeding numbers (more about this here).
- Most Redshank wintering in Britain & Ireland are of local or Icelandic origin. Fennoscandian numbers seem to be stable; if there were any changes, these would probably not be apparent in wintering numbers within the British Isles.
- The Eurasian Curlew has been classified as ‘near-threatened’ and the species is known to be declining in many areas (see this blog about serious problems in Ireland). Ringing shows a particularly strong link between Finland, where breeding numbers seem to be increasing, and Britain & Ireland. The decline in British and Irish winter numbers is probably being driven by lower breeding numbers within the British Isles and in countries such as Sweden, Norway and Poland.
- There is a theory that new generations of alpina Dunlin may be more likely to winter within Europe’s mainland estuaries, instead of continuing their westward migration across the North Sea. This might explain the apparent anomaly between the 4.1% per annum rise in Fennoscandian numbers and recent winter declines of 3% in Britain and over 20% in Ireland.
Going forwards
Some of the survey areas were in particularly remote areas
Many of the study squares that were covered during these surveys are a long way from the main centres of human population in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The governments of the three countries are to be congratulated for supporting this important monitoring, which relied on the commitment of hundreds of volunteers. It is to be hoped that these surveys will continue and that further species-focused work will be able to explain some of the differences across Fennoscandia, particularly between eastern and western areas. The rapid declines in numbers of two species that migrate southeast each autumn (Broad-billed Sandpiper and Red-necked Phalarope) highlights the need for better information about what is happening on the flyway linking Fennoscandia with the Arabian Sea and coastal countries of the Indian Ocean.
Paper
Population trends of waders on their boreal and arctic breeding grounds in northern Europe: Åke Lindström, Martin Green, Magne Husby, John Atle Kålås, Aleksi Lehikoinen & Martin Stjernman. Wader Study 26(3)
Click on the title of paper to access it on the International Wader Study Group website. Paper is only available to members of IWSG. If you have read the whole of this blog you’ll probably want to join!
Nesting Bar-tailed Godwit in smart summer plumage
Graham (@grahamfappleton) has studied waders for over 40 years and is currently involved in wader research in the UK and in Iceland. He was Director of Communications at The British Trust for Ornithology until 2013 and is now a freelance writer and broadcaster.
The map alongside clearly demonstrates the strong link between the Wash and Norway. Other interesting things that have been discovered about Oystercatchers:
In the early days of the WWRG, Grey Plovers occurred in much smaller numbers than they do now. Writing in an article about the first 40 years of the Group, Clive Minton told the story of the first catch of 100, made in 1963, that was celebrated with three bottles of champagne provided by the late Hugh Boyd, delivering on an incentive that he had promised.
The biggest catches of Sanderling are generally in the summer, when the Wash is a meeting point for birds from Greenland and Siberia. July can sometimes see catches of 200 or more birds. Traditionally, a Sanderling catch was the curtain-raiser at the start of Wash Week, an opportunity for the whole team to make one catch before splitting into ‘Terrington’ and ‘Lincolnshire’ teams for the rest of the main summer trip.
The latest population estimates suggest that Great Britain has lost 26,000 wintering Redshank in less than a decade, representing a drop of 20%. Perhaps WWRG data can be used to help to explain these declines? Here are some of the things we know:
Winter Turnstone are birds that will head for Greenland and NE Canada in the spring but recoveries of birds in Finland and other Scandinavian countries indicate a passage of continental birds. African recoveries of WWRG-ringed birds probably include birds from Canada/Greenland and Finland/Scandinavia.
Greenshank: The Group supports a colour-ringing project that was initiated by Pete Potts, in Hampshire. 
The Group still aims to maintain its general ringing programme, so that a representative sample of the key species carry rings. 
It’s usually a good day if you see a Spotted Redshank in Britain or Ireland. How about a flock of 60?
The spring of 1975 was very wet in East Anglia, with twice the annual monthly rain as is normal in April. Pools formed in fields, seed failed to germinate and there were many bare patches in cereal crops. Rather than leave a muddy pool to bake in the summer sun, a tidy-minded Terrington farmer decided to cultivate a strip through the corner of one of his fields, very close to the sea-wall. Conveniently, he created an area that was just the right width in which to set cannon-nets, meaning that any birds that chose to roost on the bare part of the field over high-tide were almost bound to get caught. It is unlikely that we missed many other Spotted Redshanks when we caught our 60.
There have been two foreign recoveries of the Terrington birds, caught on 27 July 1975; amazingly both were in Morocco. The first was shot in March 1976, perhaps on its way north, but the second, shot in January 1983, may well have been wintering in North Africa. There has been one other foreign recovery of a WWRG since 1975; a bird ringed by WWRG in August 1978 was shot in Italy in March 1979, presumably on spring migration. This was the only Spotted Redshank ringed by WWRG in 1978. Six Spotted Redshanks have been recovered in France since 1975.
The latest 
As I prepared for this article, I turned to Twitter to see how unusual the Terrington catch had been, simply in terms of the number of birds counted in flocks. There have been some recent largish counts, including one of 52 at Old Hall Marshes (Essex) in September 2017 and 32 at Blacktoft Sands in Yorkshire in 2015 but, interestingly, I learnt that bigger flocks were mostly historical. According to the three books, The Birds of Norfolk, Suffolk & Essex, the three peak counts have been 187 at Snettisham in 1977, 112 at Minsmere in 1991 and 127 on the River Colne in 1972. Kent beat these East Anglian county records with a maximum of 220 at Stoke Saltings on 8 October 1972 (not Grovehurst, as reported in Birds of Kent, 1981 – thanks to Kevin Thornton for correction).
Potentially, the development of new nature reserves around the coast and along our river valleys might have created new opportunities for Spotted Redshanks, with birds spreading out across more sites and hence in lower concentrations? To get a national viewpoint, I turned to the online report from the monthly 
Here, Spotted Redshank is listed as 
wadertales 