Tracking technology used to help rare wading bird in UK first - Natural England
Natural England is using pioneering technology to track the movement and habitat preferences of a small wading bird, Jack Snipe, for the first time in the UK.
- GPS tags fitted to track movements and habitat of Jack Snipe wading birds
- One of 10 tagged birds at wetland sites in the Midlands has just been recaptured
- Data will help landscape scale conservation and other species
After 10 birds were fitted with Global Positioning System (GPS) archival tags in south Staffordshire earlier this year, a tagged Jack Snipe has just been recaptured.
The tags Natural England have used are accurate to 10 metres to record the location of the bird at set times. While Jack Snipe have been previously tagged in the UK, the tags used were not so accurate.
The GPS tags help to better understand the birds’ habitat needs and how best to manage sites for them and other wildlife. This will help Natural England to understand more about the Jack Snipe population numbers and contribute towards wider nature recovery.
The birds were tagged at wetland sites in the Natural England Midlands Heathland Heartland project area in Staffordshire and the West Midlands.
Kevin Clements at Natural England, who has been involved with the project since the start, said: “Action for nature’s recovery needs to be evidence-led and projects like this show how science can play such a vital role. We were excited to recapture one of the 10 tagged birds recently and, as far as we are aware, this the first documented migration route of any Jack Snipe in the UK and elsewhere. There is estimated to be a UK wintering population of about 110,000 Jack Snipes, but due to the secretive nature of the birds it’s impossible to census them accurately. We hope that this project will give us a better picture of how stable their population is and calculate overall population figures.”
The GPS tracker shows that the Jack Snipe’s journey included visits to Germany, Poland and Latvia before returning back to Staffordshire.