Bird disturbance surveys on North Kent estuaries

The client

The North Kent BirdWise/SAMMS partnership — a collaboration between local authorities, developers, and environmental organisations including Kent Wildlife Trust and RSPB — commissioned by the partnership and managed by Medway Council.

The challenge

The estuaries of North Kent support internationally important waterbird populations, protected as SPA/SSSI sites. The BirdWise/SAMMS initiative was set up to understand and mitigate the impact of human disturbance on these birds. Ten years into the scheme, the partnership needed a robust evaluation of how effective that mitigation had been, and where future effort should be focused.

What we did

Over the winter of 2021/22, our team of ornithologists carried out bird disturbance surveys at predefined locations across North Kent's estuaries. We recorded bird counts, logged disturbance events, and observed how wildfowl and waders responded to different sources of disturbance, particularly dog walking. We then compared these results against baseline data collected ten years earlier, allowing us to assess change over the full lifetime of the scheme so far.

The outcome achieved

Our survey design pinpointed the stretches of coastline under the greatest pressure from human disturbance, and built a stronger evidence base for how North Kent's protected waterbird populations are responding to it. Our evaluation of the first ten years of BirdWise/SAMMS mitigation informed recommendations for future research priorities, and the final report and underlying data will be made publicly available.

Star species: a diverse assemblage of waders and wildfowl that make up North Kent's internationally important waterbird populations. A full summary of species and population trends is available via the BTO Wetland Bird Survey.

Full details of the BirdWise/SAMMS partnership are available at northkent.birdwise.org.uk.