£50,000 to Watch Curlews Go Extinct: Warwickshire's Conservation Farce

The Banbury Ornithological Society's curlew "rescue" project is an obscene waste of charitable and public funds—a textbook example of ideologically-driven conservation that prioritises feeling good over achieving results.

After watching curlew numbers crash by 80% in two decades, their solution is to beg for £50,000 to erect some temporary fencing and bribe farmers. It's conservation malpractice dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Let's be brutally clear about what this article reveals: these amateur conservationists have presided over the near-total extirpation of breeding curlews in Warwickshire—from 25 pairs to five—while congratulating themselves on a 74% hatching success rate for fenced nests. This is the equivalent of a surgeon celebrating his excellent suturing technique while the patient bleeds to death on the table.

The population hasn't just declined under their watch; it's collapsing toward zero, and their response is to double down on failure.

The evidence of their incompetence is laid bare in their own words. Ms Guilbride admits curlews face predation from "foxes, badgers, buzzards and crows"—yet nowhere in this £50,000 plan is there any mention of actually controlling these predators.

Instead, they propose wrapping electric fencing around a few nests like swaddling blankets, training more volunteers to perform ineffective busy-work, and paying farmers to delay hay cutting so chicks can "hide from buzzards." Hide from buzzards? This isn't conservation strategy; it's a children's storybook approach to wildlife management.

Any competent gamekeeper could explain why this is doomed. Ground-nesting birds require landscape-scale predator management—systematic, year-round control of fox, crow, and stoat populations across entire breeding territories. This isn't controversial science; it's established practice backed by decades of evidence from grouse moors and shooting estates where curlews, lapwings, and other waders thrive precisely because professional gamekeepers control predators.

But gamekeeping has become ideologically unacceptable to the bird-watching establishment, despite its proven effectiveness. The result is this grotesque charade: soliciting donations from the public and matching funds from British Airways and Aviva to finance a project that cannot possibly succeed, while the actual solution—employing professional gamekeepers—remains unmentionable.

The financial waste is staggering. £50,000 could employ gamekeepers to conduct proper predator control across the remaining curlew territories. Instead, it will fund "volunteer recruitment and training," temporary fencing that protects perhaps a dozen nests while hundreds of square miles remain predator-saturated, and payments to farmers that address a marginal issue (hay cutting timing) while ignoring the catastrophic one (predation).

This is virtue-signalling conservation—designed to make donors feel they're "doing something" while avoiding the politically incorrect but necessary work of actually managing predator populations. It's conservation as performance art, where the appearance of caring matters more than outcomes.

The harsh reality? Professional gamekeepers routinely achieve breeding success rates far exceeding this project's celebrated 74%, across entire estates, at a fraction of the cost per bird fledged. They do so through legal, systematic predator control—trapping foxes, shooting crows, managing corvid populations—creating landscapes where ground-nesters can actually sustain populations rather than limp toward extinction behind temporary fencing.

The partnership's claim to be "rapidly running out of time" is darkly comic. They've already run out of time. They ran out of time when the population dropped to 15 pairs, then 10, then five. Now they're fundraising to watch the final act of a tragedy they've orchestrated through ideological stubbornness and professional incompetence.

This isn't conservation; it's assisted extinction with a fundraising appeal attached. Every pound donated to this project is a pound that could have funded effective predator control but will instead subsidise failure. When the last curlew disappears from Warwickshire—and unless this approach changes radically, it will—the Banbury Ornithological Society will doubtless issue another press release about habitat loss and climate change, carefully avoiding mention of their refusal to employ the one proven method that could have saved them.

The volunteers may be sincere. The cause may be worthy. But sincerity without competence is just expensive failure, and these curlews deserve better than to be the collateral damage of conservation ideology masquerading as science.