Latest farm product: Meadowbirds

The conventional way of protecting meadowbirds in The Netherlands is to pay farmers for setting aside the best breeding areas. But now there's a better way: paying farmers for each meadowbird clutch means more effective protection at a lower cost, according to new research in the April issue of Conservation Biology.

This approach has the added benefit of putting farmers and conservationists on the same side. "Most of the farmers participating...reacted enthusiastically and cooperated wholeheartedly with conservationists," say Kees Musters of Leiden University in Leiden, The Netherlands, and his three co-authors.

The Netherlands' expanses of grasslands have 28 species of meadowbirds and are the major breeding grounds for six species. Notably, up to 90% of the black-tailed godwits in Western and Central Europe breed there. Because most of The Netherlands' meadowbird habitat is used for intensive dairy farming, the Dutch government pays dairy farmers to protect crucial areas during the breeding season by, for instance, mowing in mid-June instead of in early May. However, this approach is expensive, coming to 100-400 Euro/clutch (a Euro is about a U.S. dollar).

To see if they could come up with a better way to preserve meadowbirds, Musters and his colleagues studied paying farmers per clutch rather than for restricting their farming practices. The researchers monitored breeding on about 20 acres of the richest meadowbird habitat in 13 farms in the Western Peat Area: farmers were paid per clutch in 10 experimental farms and were paid nothing in three control farms (interestingly, the researchers started with nine control farms but had to throw out six of them because the farmers became so heavily involved in bird management).

Musters and his colleagues found that their method of conserving meadowbirds was effective. Farms that were paid per clutch had greater hatching success than farms that were not: about 65% vs. 48% for lapwings and 63% vs. 39% for black-tailed godwits. These increases in hatching success are significant in light of the fact that conservationists estimate that to maintain populations, the minimum hatching success rate is 62% for lapwings and 63% for black-tailed godwits.

The farmers' conservation strategies included putting iron racks over clutches to protect from being trampled by cows, marking clutches so they can manure and mow around them, and mowing bird-rich fields last to give the clutches more time to hatch.

The researchers' method was also cheaper than the current 100-400 Euro/clutch: the average cost of paying farmers per clutch was 40 Euro. This figure is based primarily on how long it took farmers to find and protect clutches. To promote conservation of the rarer meadowbirds, which take more time to find, the researchers propose that the fee/clutch vary with the rareness of meadowbird species in The Netherlands, ranging from 12 Euro for the common oystercatcher to 120 Euro for the rare Ruff.

The pay-per-clutch method of conserving meadowbirds is now being used in 27,000 acres of grasslands in the Western Peat Area as well as in several other parts of The Netherlands.

Musters' co-authors are: Maurice Kruk, who did this work while at Leiden University in Leiden, The Netherlands, and is now at a national nature conservation NGO, and Hans de Graaf and Wim ter Keurs of Leiden University in Leiden, The Netherlands.

For faxes of papers, contact Robin Meadows robin@nasw.org

More information about the Society for Conservation Biology can be found at http://conbio.net/scb/