BACK IN BLACK

Rearing and releasing black-tailed godwits has given the rare wader a much-needed boost

- JO CAIRD

REARING BLACK-TAILED GODWITS FROM wild-laid eggs for later release 'headstarting' in conservation parlance - is an anxiety-inducing business, as I discover on a late-June visit to WWT Welney Wetland Centre, Norfolk.

First, you have to find and collect the eggs before they're snaffled by predators, which is tricky in the wet grassland habitat favoured by this wading bird. Then you have to transport this extremely delicate cargo safely over the bumpy fenland tracks. Finally, you have to incubate the eggs, mimicking the work of parent birds by turning them multiple times each day, and using hi-tech tools to monitor the health of the growing chicks inside. And the heavy lifting hasn't even begun yet.

"The hatching period is the really intense bit," says William Costa, lead aviculturist at the WWT and a member of the team responsible for the headstarting element of Project Godwit. This five-year partnership between the WWT and the RSPB aimed to boost UK numbers of one of our rarest breeding waders. And Costa has spent countless antisocial hours - 4am is a common hatching time - keeping watch over chicks at this most critical stage.

"Each egg has an ID, linked to its parents in the nest, which we apply to the corresponding hatchling so that we can follow it through its life," he says, showing me around the incubation room in a Portakabin, now mostly tidied away for the season. "If I've got four hatching at the same time, I need to sit and watch them. You just have to be there."