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Why?

Immediate conservation action is vital if the evocative bubbling song of the Curlew is not to be lost from Shropshire forever. There is a real danger that breeding Curlews will become extinct here in the next few years.

Atlas work in 2008-13 did not find Curlews in 62% of the tetrads where they were found in 1985-90, a massive contraction of range. Over the same period, the population has declined by an estimated 77% in only 20 years, from around 700 pairs in 1990 to around 160 pairs in 2010.

Monitoring carried out by Community Wildlife Groups shows that numbers are still going down. Nest monitoring by the Stiperstones-Corndon Landscape Partnership Scheme in the County hotspot, with a quarter of the breeding pairs, found disastrous breeding seasons in 2015 and 2016, when apparently no young fledged. The decline continued in 2017.

Nationally, Curlew was added to the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern in December 2015 because of a decline of 62% since the 1960s. Internationally, the UK has a special responsibility for Curlew, as we have an estimated 28% of the European breeding population, with more in winter, and an estimated 19-27% of the world population.

The County hosts a significant proportion of the remaining population in southern England, and it is one of the few species on Shropshire’s Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern where the SOS can take immediate, direct action.

Curlew is the highest bird conservation priority in the country

The ‘Save Our Curlews’ Campaign & Appeal

In 2018 and 2019, Shropshire Wildlife Trust (SWT) and SOS established a long-term County-wide ‘Save Our Curlews’ campaign, funded by a joint appeal. SWT withdrew in 2019. The Campaign and Appeal are being continued and co-ordinated by SOS.

For details of the Campaign from 2020 onwards, and how to donate to the Appeal, click here. SOS will support the campaign from its own funds, support grant applications to other bodies, and encourage SOS and Community Wildlife Group members, and the general public, to donate.

If, like us, you think that Shropshire will be a much poorer place without Curlews, please support the appeal.

The Campaign is a long-term project, and will:

• support population monitoring by Community Wildlife Groups,
• continue nest protection and chick monitoring, to establish the reasons for low chick survival rates, and address the key issue of increasing chick fledging rates,
• find out if nest and chick survival rates are equally poor across the whole County, and if not, establish the reasons for the variation,
• extend the project to more CWG areas (including a new area, the Strettons, in 2020, with funding from the National Trust’s Stepping Stones Project, thanks to support from the People’s Postcode Lottery), and two CWG areas around Oswestry (Three Parishes [Oswestry North] and Tanat to Perry [Oswestry South]) in 2023.
• work closely with farmers and
• feed results into South of England Curlew Forum, the national Curlew Recovery Partnership, and the national Curlew Species Recovery Group (co-ordinated by the RSPB), to help establish the need for effective Government action

Curlews in Shropshire before the Save our Curlews campaign began

The status of Curlews in Shropshire, a summary of the monitoring carried out by the CWGs since the first one started in 2004 up until 2019, and other aspects of the campaign, can be found here.

Project Work 2018-25

The Campaign and Appeal initially built on  on project work carried out in 2018 and 2019 with the Upper Clun and Clee Hill Community Wildlife Groups. No work was carried out in 2020, because of covid-19 restrictions, but  further work was continued in these two areas in 2021 and 2022.

Joint work with Strettons area Community Wildlife Group started in the Strettons area in 2021, supported by the Stepping Stones project, and continued through to 2025.

Work in Upper Clun and Clee Hill areas was discontinued in 2023, and replaced by work with the two CWGs in the Oswestry area

The full reports of project work in these areas can be found here

• Save Our Curlews: Report for 2018-2022 (which includes a detailed analysis, including the reasons for the poor breeding success)
• Save Our Curlews: Report for 2023
• Save Our Curlews: Report for 2024
• Save Our Curlews: Report for 2025

Concurrently, from 2018 onwards, 10 CWGs have monitored the vast majority of the County Curlew population. In 2019. Clee Hill took on an additional 4 tetrads to the west, and Abdon took on an additional 7 tetrads to the west and south, to close the gap between the two areas, and cover additional squares with known Curlews, providing coverage of 267 of Shropshire’s 870 tetrads.  Two squares were added to the Strettons are in 2021, closing a gap with the Upper Onny Group,  at the north end of Long Mynd. Each year (apart from 2020), over 270 people contributed over 2,200 hours to the surveys, a clear indication of the commitment of local people to saving our Curlews. Between them, the Groups initially found 94-115 territories, but the number has steadily declined, and for the first time, the County population was estimated at less than 100 pairs in 2025. A map showing the areas coved by each of the 10 groups, overlain on the Curlew distribution map from the 2008-13 Bird Atlas, together with a table showing when each group started, the size of each area, the estimated population when it first started, the number of territories found in 2018 and 2025, and the number of territories lost in that period, can be found here.

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Overview of SOS Project Work from February 2020

Planned project work in 2020 was abandoned because of covid-19 restrictions.

Project work restarted in 2021, in the Upper Clun and Clee Hills areas, and started in a new area, the Strettons. It continued in these areas in 2022.

This involved finding and protecting nests with an electric fence,  followed by radio-tagging and tracking the chicks that hatched, to find out what happened to them.

One of the aims of the SOS project is to see if breeding outcomes are equally poor across the whole County. Work was therefore discontinued in Upper Clun and Clee Hill, and started in two CWG areas in the north-west, Tanat to Perry (Oswestry south) and Three Parishes (Oswestry north) in 2023. It continued in Strettons area, and in all three of these areas in 2024 and 2025. In total, over the three years,  nine nests produced 27 chicks, but not a single one fledged.

Fencing nests worked reasonably well in all project areas, with 57% of 51 fenced nests producing chicks, ranging from 67% in the Upper Clun down to 52% in the Strettons. This is a considerably higher percentage than for unfenced nests. The results are shown in Table 1.

 

Table 1. Proportion of Fenced Nests Producing Chicks

Two more clutches in Clee Hill, both from the same pair in different years, never hatched although they were incubated for the full term, and another clutch in Upper Clun partly hatched, but the chicks died almost immediately afterwards, so the effectiveness of the fencing was higher than shown in the table.

 

A summary of the project results for its seven years of operation in four areas is shown in Table 2 below. The detailed results for each area can be found here.   Add link

 

Table 2. SOS Save our Curlews project work: summary of results 2018-25

 

 

 

Population Monitoring

The CWG Bird Surveys were also cancelled in 2020 until coronavirus restrictions were eased in mid-May, but the planned population monitoring of the vast majority of the County’s estimated population of around 120 breeding pairs by 10 different CWGs continued within lockdown restrictions. Overall, coverage was not as good as usual, but some records were received from every area, and in a few cases it was as good, or even better, than 2019.

Population monitoring restarted in all10 CWG areas in 2021, but coverage levels around Oswestry recovered only slowly.

The “Pairs Located” Column in Table 2 above are the results of the CWG surveys in the Project areas. The results for each CWG area are shown in the Table.

The nest fields of several pairs were located, but the breeding attempts all ended before the date when incubation would have been complete. No agricultural activities had taken place in any of those fields. It is unlikely that any chicks would have fledged before mid-July, but there have been very few records since the end of June, as Curlews had already left their breeding areas.

Apart from the results of the nest-finding project (Curlews fledged from fenced nests: see Table 1 above), only 3-5 Curlew chicks in Upper Clun in 2022, and perhaps 2-3 Curlew chicks in Oswestry North in 2024, are known to have fledged from unfound nests.

Reporting Project Results

Annual Reports are published elsewhere on this website (see links above), in the SOS quarterly magazine The Buzzard, and in the County Bird Reports.

Summaries have been sent each year to the South of England Curlew Forum for inclusion in its newsletters.

Results for years before 2022 were also published in British Birds magazine

Nation-wide initiatives raising the profile of Curlew

Concurrently with the development of the SOS Campaign, the profile of Curlews, and the need for concerted and co-ordinated action to halt and reverse their decline, has received considerable support over the last 10 years.

• An article in British Birds in November 2015, pointing out that the UK had about 28% of the European population, and 18-27% of the world population, and arguing that Curlew conservation is the highest Bird conservation priority in the UK
• Curlew was added to the national Red List of Birds of Conservation 4 in December 2015.
• Mary Colwell’s high profile 500 mile walk, resulting in the publication of her book “Curlew Moon”
• The South of England Curlew Forum was established in 2017 to promote Curlew conservation in southern England. Membership includes representatives of Curlew projects in 12 Counties from Shropshire southwards, RSPB, BTO, WWT and NE. It continues to collate and publish data (population, population trends and poor breeding success) and encourage new projects in areas with a Curlew population. It makes the case for urgent action to safeguard these remaining populations. Shropshire is an important part of this given that it has about one-fifth of the known population in southern England. See curlewcall.org. Link inaccessible
• Formation of Action Groups similar to the South of England Forum in Ireland, Scotland and Wales
• Setting up a national Curlew Species Recovery Group, comprising RSPB (who provide the chair / secretariat), BTO, GWCT, WWT, JNCC, National Trust, Birdwatch Ireland, National Parks Ireland and the four country-based statutory agencies.  The purpose of the group is to bring together five statutory agencies and various non-governmental organisations to shape and drive a co-ordinated programme for curlew conservation
• A “Curlew Summit” was held at 10 Downing Street in July 2019 (report published in British Birds, September 2019 here.)
• An article on behalf of the South of England Curlew Forum (Saving England’s Lowland Eurasian Curlews Colwell et al, British Birds, May 2020), described the population of about 500 pairs in the areas monitored by Forum members, and the related conservation efforts. Shropshire’s estimated 130 pairs (in 2018) is more than one-quarter of the south of England total. The article can be found here.
• The article also referred to a new national charity, Curlew Action (curlewaction.org), set up to promote best practice and support the work of the Forum and Curlew conservation nationally and internationally.
• The Curlew Recovery Partnership was formed in March 2021, to provide co-ordination and support to those engaged in Curlew conservation in England, with a Steering Group of nine members (two estates, Natural England,  BTO, RSPB, GWCT and WWT, and Curlew Action and Curlew Country). Mary Colwell, representing Curlew Action, is chair, and Ryan Burrell is full time Director (see https://www.curlewrecovery.org/).
• There are now a wide variety of Curlew research and conservation projects operating in England, several supported by Natural England’s Species Recovery Programme.

The increased monitoring has been accompanied by several research studies. While agricultural intensification (the switch from hay to silage, resulting in grass being cut several times in the breeding season), land drainage and other grassland management has undoubtedly driven the decline over many years, the evidence now suggests that predation levels are such that habitat restoration will not be sufficient to reverse the decline. So why are predation levels so high?

Colwell et al refer to the “potential relationship between high numbers of generalist predators and the release of around 50 million pheasants and partridges into the countryside every year”

BTO scientists investigated “Associations Between Gamebird Release and Generalist Predators” (Pringle et al, 2019), and stated “the sheer biomass of over 40 million Pheasants released for shooting each year is significantly more than double the biomass of all wild bird species breeding throughout the UK. With only a small percentage of these birds being shot and retrieved [estimated at 35%], most of the rest are then available to the medium and large avian and mammalian predators . . . hence potentially causing a real imbalance in the ecosystem.” The paper, “using [BTO} data from the last Bird Atlas and the annual Breeding Bird Survey, showed that large scale variation in avian predator populations (Raven, Buzzard, Magpie, Carrion Crow) is positively associated with gamebird releases so predator numbers are increased by gamebird releases.”

Henrietta Pringle produced a graph for BTO News and a blog based on the analyses done using BBS data. As a guide, “if we start with a hypothetical population of five crows in a 1-km square, the model predicts that the following year, with no pheasants, there would be 5.08 crows in the square. If there were 10 Pheasants in the square, there would instead be 5.13 crows in year 2 and if there were 100 Pheasants, there would be 5.62 crows. Similar patterns were also found for Buzzard (with Red-legged Partridge), Jay (with Red-legged Partridge) and Raven (with Pheasant, Red-legged Partridge and total biomass of gamebirds). These figures should be viewed cautiously, but they give some sort of idea of how predator populations could be boosted by gamebird releases, particularly if you extrapolate to larger areas and over many years”

As yet there is no similar research on gamebird releases sustaining fox populations, but the GWCT website refers to the number of foxes “controlled” and reported through the national gamebag census, and states “There has been a continuous increase in the bag index since 1961, leading to it being more than three times higher in 2009 than in 1961.” Pheasant release increased 10-fold over the same period. With considerable understatement, the website article concludes “The widespread rearing and releasing of gamebirds has probably improved fox food supply in autumn and winter.”

RSPB has undertaken several initiatives to address the problems facing the declining Curlew population

1. A “Curlew Trial Management project” was started in 2015 to test whether a combination of predator control and habitat management can be delivered as a conservation tool to improve breeding success and breeding abundance of curlew. The measures were trialled at six sites across the UK, each with a non-intervention “control site” nearby. Baseline data was collected in 2015, and the interventions were trialled and monitored for a further four years. While the number of nesting attempts increased in the managed habitats, there was no statistically significant increase in breeding success, because the predator control of crows and foxes was insufficient to reduce the predation of Curlews. (Douglas et al 2023, summarised by Douglas (https://www.rspb.org.uk/helping-nature/what-we-do/influence-government-and-business/policies-and-briefings/curlew-trial-management-project)
2. A paper by RSPB research scientists, “A review of predation as a limiting factor for bird populations in mesopredator-rich landscapes: a case study of the UK” found “that predation, mainly by foxes and non-native mammals, can limit the numbers of ground-nesting species, such as waders, gamebirds, and  seabirds” (Roos et al, 2018). This led to an RSPB Review of Shooting Policy, announced at the AGM in October 2020. Mason et al, of the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, provided the scientific basis that informed the review, which led to a new policy which included calling on the shooting industry for a voluntary reduction in the number of large-scale gamebird releases because of the damage they do to the environment, and the harm to many species of birds and other animals, by October 2022.. At that time, and given the lack of progress towards a more sustainable gamebird shooting industry over decades and minimal signs of positive change for the future, RSPB “concluded that further regulation and better enforcement of existing rules will be required to deliver the changes necessary in the face of a nature and climate crisis”, and called for governments across the UK to license the release of non-native gamebirds, underpinned by a statutory code of practice, with mandatory reporting of movements and releases.
3. An Action plan to save UK Curlews from extinction was launched for World Curlew Day in April 2025, developed by charities, farmers, scientists and others. Specifically, it calls on government and agencies to support urgent, co-ordinated action across the UK, and establish a Curlew Recovery Task Force to galvanise action. for Curlew (https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/news/curlew-action-plan). link

Curlew Country – “Headstarting”

Since 2018, Curlew Country has concentrated on “headstarting”, by removing eggs from nests, incubating them, rearing the hatched chicks in captivity, and releasing the fledged young into the wild, under license obtained from Natural England. By the end of 2022, over 120 headstarted chicks had been released.

When the experiment started, It was not known how many of these young birds would survive and return to their natal area to breed, or whether the absence of contact with parents will have any effect on their behaviour and life skills, so the results need to be carefully monitored. However, experience in previous years found that few if any of these eggs would have hatched and produced fledged young if left in the nests, which is part of the justification for the experiment.

Curlews generally stay on their wintering grounds during their first year, and return to their natal area to breed when they are two years old, and wild Curlew survival rate to two years old is 36% (Rob Robinson, BTO, pers.comm). We could therefore reasonably expect 36% of the 120+released  headstarted birds (i.e. 44  birds) released 2017-22 to return by 2024.

The Curlew Country spring newsletter in 2025 reported that there were eight confirmed headstarted individuals breeding in the project area in 2024, with three more whose territories were not identified.

Geoff Hilton, Chief Scientist and Head of Research at the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, who has overseen WWTs work on headstarting several species, has said that headstarting Curlews is a sticking plaster on a big problem. It is essential to have a Curlew Recovery Plan in place too. Is a head-started Curlew as good at being a wild bird as a wild-raised Curlew? It should continue to be seen as an experimental technique.

For more information, see the Curlew Country website www.curlewcountry.org.

Colour-ringing

Over 500 Curlews have been caught and colour-ringed by Tony Cross since 2015, mainly in spring at Dolydd Hafren MWT reserve near Welshpool, when they are returning to their breeding areas. The 4, probably 5, fledged young from the Clee Hill project in 2018 and 2019,  5 well-grown young in Upper Clun from unfenced nests just prior to fledging in 2022, and another well-grown young just prior to fledging just north of Oswestry in 2024. were all colour-ringed, as were all the headstarted Curlews released by Curlew Country

If you see a Curlew, please check it for colour-rings. More details can be found here. You can also report any observations to Leo Smith.

How You Can Help

SOS members, and anyone else interested in saving Curlews, would be very welcome in any CWG, and be a big asset. Basically, you take on a survey square (a ‘tetrad’, a 2×2 kilometre square on the OS national grid – the same survey unit as the Bird Atlas) – and walk round it three times on dates to suit you, around 1 April, 1 May and 15 June, for around 3 hours each visit.

The areas covered by the various CWGs, overlain on the Curlew distribution map from the 2008-13 County Bird Atlas, can be found here. Help with the organisation and recruiting of new members would be especially welcome. For further information about each of the Community Wildlife Groups, see their website.

If anyone wants to help with Curlew monitoring work by the various Community Wildlife Groups, or locating nest sites, or has any ideas about who we can approach for funding or how we can raise more money for Curlew conservation, please contact Leo Smith (contact details below).

In addition, records of Curlew territories elsewhere in the County are helpful. If you know of one, but haven’t reported it yet, please tell the County Bird Recorder or Leo Smith.

Curlew Predation and Pheasant Release in Shropshire

In Shropshire, the “Curlew Country” project found 33 nests in the two years 2015 and 2016. Only three nests in each of the two years hatched any chicks. The other 27 nests all failed, with more than half being predated by foxes, just under 25% by badgers, with Carrion Crows and agricultural operations accounting for the rest. None of the chicks fledged, and monitoring by the CWGs found no evidence that young fledged from any other nest in the project area in either of the two years.

Save our Curlews campaign work in Upper Clun and Upper Onny in 2018 and 2019 found 11 nests, 10 were fenced, and eight produced chicks (of the other two, in one case the fence was knocked over by sheep, and in the other the eggs didn’t hatch). Eighteen chicks were radio tagged and followed, and 4-5 from two broods (both from the same territory, in successive years) fledged, but the other 13 were all predated (at least 3, probably 8, by foxes, 3 by avian predators (at least one a Buzzard), and two by unknown predators). None were lost to agricultural activities. Again, monitoring by the CWGs found no evidence that young fledged from any other nest in either area in either of the two years. The fledging rate in each of these areas was therefore not sufficient to sustain the population, and predation is the major problem.

The 2008-13 Atlas showed breeding evidence for Pheasants in 854 of the County’s 870 tetrads, with it absent in both the breeding and winter seasons only in urban Telford. The range (tetrad occupancy) had increased since 1985-90, and BBS showed a 69% increase in the local breeding population between 1997 and 2014. The feral population was estimated at 43,400-45,000 breeding pairs.

In 2018, figures obtained from the Animal and Plant Health Authority (APHA), a Government Agency, showed that 726,000 pheasants were released in Shropshire in that year alone (Shrubshole 2018). The following links provide more details on Pheasant releases.

• Pheasant Numbers by English County 2018
• Pheasant Releases by Shropshire Postcode 2018 (.jpg format)

Going back to the figures for the increase in the crow population in Henrietta Pringle’s paper (an increase of 10% in a 1km square if 100 Pheasants are released), the average number of Pheasants released in every 1km square in Shropshire was more than twice that number, over 200 every year, up until at least 2019.

Unfortunately, the only geographical breakdown of the County total was to main postcode area, so it is not possible to do a detailed correlation of where the Pheasants are released with where the few remaining Curlews are breeding unsuccessfully, but as there are over 300 times more Pheasant nests than Curlew nests, plus the remainder of the released Pheasants, for foxes to predate, it is almost certain that the loss of Curlews is just collateral damage.

Shropshire (including Telford & Wrekin) Local Nature Recovery Strategy.

The Government has initiated 48 Local Nature Recovery Strategies, which together cover the whole of England. For more information, see the LNRS part of this website. Curlew is the highest bird priority in the County LNRS, and supporting the LNRS Curlew Action Plan will be an important part of the SOS Campaign, as it develops.

Review of SOS Save our Curlews Campaign

While we still need to complete another year of fieldwork in the Oswestry area to have at least three years effective results in all project areas, we can draw some provisional conclusions. In particular, as there have been no fledged young from 32 fenced nests in the last three years, it is likely that we will conclude that there is no point in continuing the expensive work of finding and fencing nests until there is evidence that predator populations have been reduced at the landscape scale, sufficient to ensure that there is not an influx of predators to fill any gaps resulting from localised predator control in Curlew “hotspots”.

The Campaign will also aim to complement the work of the Natural England Curlew Species Recovery programme, the RSPB Curlew Action Plan, the Shropshire Local Nature Recovery Strategy, the Shropshire Hills National Landscape “Landscape Connections” project, funded by Heritage Lottery, and the South of England Curlew Forum and the Curlew Recovery Partnership.

It will continue to highlight the problem of predator numbers being massively increased by the annual release of millions of gamebirds. The gamebirds have wings, so they do not stay where they are released, and they have spread right across the County. We therefore need to remove the resulting excess number of predators at a landscape scale. Shropshire Ornithological Society is calling for the number of gamebirds being released into the countryside each year to be reduced to the number currently shot, within five years.

We reiterate the question, asked at the end of our 2018-22 report: “Is there any other plausible explanation for the populations of predators and scavengers in the landscape being much higher than their naturally sustainable levels, apart from  gamebird release.”  No-one has attempted to answer the question yet.

We will continue to publicise our results, explanation for them, and questions, at every opportunity.

The review of the campaign will be carried out over the next year, with the intention of publishing a revised strategy when the results of the 2026 project work in the Oswestry area are published in autumn 2026.

Acknowledgements 

1. Curlew Campaign funding 2021-25

Finding and protecting nests, tagging and following chicks, and extending this work to new areas, costs money. The total cost of project work in the four years 2021-25 (£76,642) has been financed by contributions by SOS from its own resources (£8,750, 11%), an appeal, mainly to SOS members (£39,800, 48%), grant applications (£32,600, 39%), and payments from the Shropshire Environmental Data Network (SEDN) for Curlew nest and breeding site records (£1,500, 2%).

Thanks to members of SOS who have contributed to the Appeal, some more than once, and to the lesser number of contributors from Community Wildlife Group members. Gift Aid has been collected from HMRC on all eligible donations, and included in the donations figure above.

Grants have been received from the Shropshire Hills National Landscape Trust (4 years 2021-24), Stepping Stones Project (via People’s Postcode Lottery in 2021, and via Green Recovery Challenge Fund in 2022), British Birds Charitable Trust in 2021 and 2022, Wader Quest In 2021 and 2023, Stretton Focus Community Awards in 2021 and 2023, and Garreg Llwyd Hill Windfarm Community Fund (through Upper Clun Community Wildlife Group) in 2021. Most grants were tied to particular project areas, or equipment. All these grants are gratefully acknowledged.

In total, income of £ 82,686 has been received. A small amount is in hand, carried forward to fund project work in 2026.

1. Project Fieldworkers

Thanks to the people who worked on the project, as nest-finders, fencers and / or chick trackers: Nicola Benhemada, Biome Consulting (Martin Owen & Richard Moores), Alen Bothwell, Tony Cross, Dan Gordon-Lee, David Hardwick, Andy Harmer, Mick Hayhurst, Roy Leigh, Tim Lewis, Jon Lingard, Matt Moseley, Dave Pearce, Dan Richardson and David Woodhouse. Tony Cross fitted all the radio tags, ringed the chicks, and colour-ringed the few chicks that grew big enough.

Further Information

The SOS Co-ordinator for the “Save Our Curlews” campaign is Leo Smith 07791 901732 (leo@leosmith.org.uk).

References

• Aebischer, N. J., Davey, P. D., & Kingdon, N. G. 2011. National Gamebag Census: Mammal Trends to 2009. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Fordingbridge.
• Brown, D., et al. 2015. The Eurasian Curlew – the most pressing bird conservation priority in the UK? Brit. Birds 108: 660–668.
• Douglas, D. et al. 2021. Recovering the Eurasian Curlew in the UK and Ireland: progress since 2015 and looking ahead. Brit. Birds 114: 341­–350.
• Douglas, D  et al 2023 Varying response of breeding waders to experimental manipulation of their habitat and predators  Journal for Nature Conservation Volume 72, April 2023, 126353
• Harris, S. 2021. A review of the animal welfare, public health, and environmental, ecological and conservation implications of rearing, releasing and shooting non-native gamebirds in Britain. Report to the Labour Animal Welfare Society.
• Harris, S. 2022 Carrion in the British countryside – is it a conservation problem? British Wildlife, April 2022
• Hoodless, A. Recovering the Eurasian Curlew in the UK and Ireland: a reply British Birds 115.February 2022 108-109
• Madden, J. R. 2021. How many gamebirds are released in the UK each year? European Journal of Wildlife Research 67: 72
• Mason, L. R., Bicknell, J. E., Smart, J., & Peach, W. J. 2020. The impacts of non-native gamebird release in the UK: an updated evidence review. RSPB Research Report No. 66. RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, Sandy.
• Pringle, H., Wilson, M., Calladine, J., & Siriwardena, G. 2019. Associations between gamebird releases and generalist predators. J. Appl. Ecol. 56: 2102–2113.
• Roos, S., Smart, J., Gibbons, D. W., & Wilson, J. D. 2018. A review of predation as a limiting factor for bird populations in mesopredator-rich landscapes: a case study in the UK. Biol. Rev. 93: 1915–1937.
• Sage, R. 2017 Non shooting losses of released pheasants GWCT Annual Review 2017 pp26-27
•  Shrubsole, G. 2019 Who Owns England? How we lost our green and pleasant land and how to take it back. William Collins, London. https://bit.ly/2XJM194
• Smith, L. 2019a. The Birds of Shropshire. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
• Smith, L. Recovering the Eurasian Curlew in the UK and Ireland (Two letters: British Birds 114 December 2021 pp.769–771; and British Birds 115: January 2022 pp 53–54.
• Wall, T. 2019. Pheasant species account. In: Thomas, G. (ed.), Shropshire County Bird Report 2019. Shropshire Ornithological Society, Shrewsbury.

Page updated: 08/09/2025