It’s spring on the banks of the Severn Estuary in the Severn and Avon Vale, and WWT conservationist Dan Gornall is hard at work tracking down the elusive curlew.

It’s early in the season and one of the first birds to be tracked down is Carl, named after a local farmer whose land we caught it on.

Farmers are the ‘guardians of the curlew’ and play an important role in securing the future of this much-loved bird.

By April monitoring is well under way and Dan and his colleague Kane, are out catching curlews so they can be equipped with GPS tracking devices.

Although the catching of birds for the fitting of rings and transmitters may come across as a bit intrusive, these bits of kit are crucial for our conservation work.

By using these tags we’re able to get an incredibly personal insight into the daily lives of these curlews as they travel from the banks of the Severn Estuary in the Severn and Avon Vale in search of nesting sites.

It’s been exciting to see their movement, with tracks showing birds travelling around the Midlands in search of nest sites during the breeding season.

The data provided by the GPS tags is proving crucial in our ability to better understand and save this much loved wetland bird.

As the breeding season progresses, we use drones with thermal imaging devices to help us locate curlew nests hidden amongst the long grass.

This technology means we’re able to identify hotspots in the field, where we can focus our efforts to check for nests.

With the help of local farmers who alert the team when they find eggs in their fields, this year Dan and the team find 20 nests – an improvement on previous years when numbers have been much lower. The farmers also change when they mow to avoid damaging eggs or newly hatched chicks.

As soon as we find a curlew nest, Dan is kept busy putting up fences to help protect it from predators like foxes. As a ground nesting bird, the survival of their eggs and chicks are very much dependent on evading predation.

Throughout April and May we monitor the progress of our nests and it’s not long before we find our first eggs.

Before the chicks fledge, our priority is to ring as many of them as possible. We also fit some with radio tags.

This means once they fledge, we can follow their progress and continue to monitor them over their first winter and in subsequent breeding seasons.

By mid-June it’s time to start mowing the meadows, so it’s a race against time for Dan and the team to find any remaining curlews.

We work closely with the local farmers who own these sites with one stopping mowing when he noticed a curlew and another even picking the young chicks up and carrying them in his tractor cab until mowing was completed.

By mid-August our curlew chicks have fledged and are leaving their breeding grounds and we’ve already had exciting news that one of this year’s colour ringed chicks has been photographed in Brittany in France, just weeks after fledging.

We ran a series of workshops with farmers to provide training, advice and share learning around wildlife friendly farming, soil health, working with natural processes, wetland management, and the support available to help farm businesses transition.

We’re also linking farmers up with researchers, so they can find out more about the species and habitats on their land, so they can better understand their farms' natural assets.