Securing Biodiversity in Breckland - European Commission

Changes in the extent of structures and conditions within the grass-heath resource can be inferred bychanges in abundance of breeding birds that serve as proxies of structure, by historic accounts oftheir appearance, and by the descriptions and vegetation surveys conducted by the earlier ecologists.These are considered in turn below.Changes in the abundance of some ground-nesting bird species provide a qualitative indication ofchange in the structure of grass-heath vegetation over the last 100+ years. Ringed plover Charadrius hiaticula bred widely across the fallow brecks and warrens ofBreckland in the late 19 th and early 20 th century (Dutt 1904; Clarke 1925), which resembledsandy and shingle coastal habitat. Ringed plover does not now breed on any of the grassheathsremaining in Breckland. Wheatear Oenanthe oenanthe, which requires extremely closely grazed turf, was also acharacteristic breeder on the Breckland grass-heaths. On surviving grass-heath sites, by 1970wheatear had declined to 30% of their 1950 abundance, and by 1990 to