Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Text © Mary Colwell, 2018

Illustrations © Jessica Holm, 2018

‘Curlews’ © A.W. Bullen first published on https://hellopoetry.com/. Reproduced by permission.

‘Messengers of Spring’ © Kerry Darbishire, 2017, Curlew Calling: An Anthology of Poetry, Nature-Writing and Images in Celebration of Curlew, edited by Karen Lloyd. http://karenlloyd-writer.co.uk/curlew-calling-anthology/. Reproduced by permission.

Love and Revolution © Alastair McIntosh, 2006, Luath Press, Edinburgh. Reproduced by permission.

Death of a Naturalist, Faber & Faber Ltd © Seamus Heaney, 1966. Reproduced by permission.

The Hounds of Hell © John Masefield, 1920. Permission to reproduce granted by The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield.

‘Incoming’, Curlew Calling: An Anthology of Poetry, Nature-Writing and Images in Celebration of Curlew, edited by Karen Lloyd © Jonathan Humble, 2017. http://karenlloyd-writer.co.uk/curlew-calling-anthology/. Reproduced by permission.

The author asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008241070

eBook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008241063

Version: 2019-03-05

Dedication

Curlew Moon is dedicated to my two sons, Dom and Greg, who were bemused by the idea of walking 500 miles for curlews, but actually think it’s quite cool.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 WHAT IS A CURLEW?

2 BEGINNING AT THE END

3 ARRIVING IN IRELAND

4 THE LAND OF LAKES

5 ENTERING EIRE

6 INTO THE BOGS

7 INTO WALES

8 SOUTHERN ENGLAND CURLEWS

9 CURLEW MOORS

10 CURLEWS AND CONTROVERSY

11 SEEING THE LAST CURLEW

12 REFLECTIONS

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

WHAT IS A CURLEW?

There is a wildlife spectacle that can transport the soul to a place of yearning and beauty, to an experience that has inspired generations of thinkers and dreamers. Imagine, if you will, a blustery cold day in December. Bitterly cold. A bird stands alone on the edge of a mudflat, some distance from where you are standing. Its silhouette is unmistakable. A plump body sits atop stilty legs. The long neck arcs into a small head, which tapers further into an extended, curved bill. The smooth, convex outlines of this curlew are alluring. They touch some ancestral attraction we all have for shapes that are round and sleek. The curved curlew’s outline is anomalous in this planar landscape, but its colour blends well. The mud is gunmetal grey, the bird brown and the water murky. The sky is dull with a hint of drab. The air is tangy with the smells of decay.

Occasionally the bird wanders a short distance and probes the mud with its beak, sometimes digging it in and twisting it around a little. Every now and then it pulls something clear of the surface, throws back its head and swallows. It is most likely a worm or shellfish, which is consumed without a fight. There is no showiness or drama, no prey is torn apart with dagger-like talons or razor beaks, it is just take a step, probe, suck; take a step, probe, eat – and repeat. It is absorbing to watch in its rhythmic motions. Icy gusts tease the bird’s feathers; at times, the curlew looks like it might be blown off its thin legs, but walk on it does, interrogating the mud beneath its feet.

Observing this self-reliant being in the distance can feel like an act of endurance. The wind is coming straight off the sea, cold and peevish. It finds every buttonhole and cuff, intent on extracting warmth. On this raw day, standing still is not pleasant. It is tempting to move closer, but despite all our inventiveness we have nothing that negotiates deep, cloying mud. Certainly not boots. Besides, curlews are nervous. If you cross an invisible line a few hundred metres away they will take off, crying in alarm. Best to stay in one spot, pressed to the binoculars, and tough it out. In the distance, the water stretches away and merges with the sky – grey into grey. The curlew is safe from unwanted encroachments in this shifting, liminal world.

Besides the admiration that you feel that something so insubstantial can withstand the rigours of this unforgiving landscape, you may not be particularly awe-inspired. You might decide it is time to get back in the car and go home, but stay with it – something magical is about to happen.

Alan McClure, in the first verse of ‘Schrödinger’s Curlew’, asks the same question. Why keep on watching the curlew visible through his window?

On the face of it, there isn’t much about this bird

To stop me in my tracks.

Brown, oblivious, busy with the ground

It totters along on stilted legs

Probing among the frozen fields.1

He does keep watching, though, and so will we. There is no sound, apart from the wind over mudflats. Wilderness has its own quality of silence, an ancient, unchanging quiet. And suddenly, for no obvious reason, the curlew takes flight. Its long legs and pointed wings launch it into the air. It soars along the horizon. Its outline resembles a miniature Concorde, purposeful and strong. But it is not the sight that is astonishing, it is the sound. The air is cleaved by a piercing, soul-aching cry – ‘curlee, curlee’ – that spreads over land and water. It is at once sweet and painful to hear, following Norman MacCaig’s description in his poem, ‘Curlew’:

Music as desolate, as beautiful

as your loved places,

mountainy marshes and glistening mudflats

by the stealthy sea.2

The pauses between the calls are as poignant as the cries themselves; they define the silence and fill it with expectation and emotion. Given a religious turn of mind, you could almost describe it as a benediction. It is as though the winterscape has been blessed.

‘Schrödinger’s Curlew’ also ends with an epiphany:

And then, untouched by my musings

The bird spreads its wings and lifts,

Naming itself, with a long, pure note

And my heart, in two states,

Leaps

and breaks.3

If you haven’t done so before, you have now met the bird named after a sliver of the moon and the taut curve of an archer’s bow, Numenius arquata, an everyday sprite, otherwise known as the Eurasian Curlew. At once magical and down-to-earth, this bird is a mysterious prober of dung and earth, mud and meadow.

Both parts of its name – Numenius and arquata – refer to its most conspicuous, long curved bill. Numenius is the Latinised version of two Greek words, neos for new and mene for moon, that thin shaving of light that is full of potential. Arquata is Latin for the archer’s bow; taut and stretched into a smooth arc. Numenius arquata, then, is the new-moon, bow-beaked bird.

Eurasian Curlews are Europe’s largest wading bird. The body is about the size of a mallard duck, but with much longer legs to hold it clear of the water. The small head, supported by a stretchy neck, terminates in that astonishing sickle-shaped bill. They are predominantly brown and grey, but when in flight, the white rump and underside flash against the sky. Eurasian Curlews are found across the European continent, from the west of Ireland through to Siberia; there are thought to be around one million birds in all, but that is only a best guess. Many areas they occupy are remote and difficult to access, so we know surprisingly little about this common European bird.

In the winter, curlews are distributed widely along the coastlines of northwest Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. They form large flocks that can be thousands strong, feeding and roosting together. In the UK, winter numbers of curlews swell to 150,000, boosted by the arrival of northern European birds, their own homes having become too frozen for these probers of mud. We are truly fortunate, one might say honoured, to have so many marvels around our shores to lift the winter months. They mingle with our own native birds that stay all year round. That figure is put at an overly optimistic 66,000 pairs. Curlews that breed in the north of England and Scotland tend to winter around northern estuaries like the Dee or Moray Firth. Southern-breeding birds go to The Wash in East Anglia, the Severn estuary and to the rocky shores and inlets of southwest England, Wales and Ireland. Some go further, to the warmth of southern Europe.

Come early spring, the coast empties as the European birds go back to the continent and the British and Irish ones head inland to breed on moors, peat bogs, rough pasture, damp, lowland flower-rich meadows and even silage fields. In simple scrapes on the ground, they lay three or four olive-green and brown mottled eggs, which the parents take turns to incubate. As Britain and Ireland are home to 25 per cent of breeding Eurasian Curlews, these islands are vitally important for their future.

Spending time watching curlews, whatever the season, is to observe a spectacle, but not in an arresting, adrenaline-pumping way. It is more of an inner experience, at the level of the soul, where the ordinary and everyday becomes extraordinary. And it is as much an experience of sound as of vision, of mind and heart.

That long bill is the most recognisable feature. It is unmissable. Three times the length of the head, up to 15 centimetres long in females, though slightly shorter in males, and curving gently downwards. It is both elegant and surprising. The pleasing arc removes from it any association with daggers and spikes; it is unthreatening, sculptural even. Psychologists tell us that roundness and smoothness trigger associations with health and youthfulness, like strong muscle against taut skin. A curlew’s bill is something that you might like to hold and run your fingers over.

The curve is there for a reason. With this arcuate tool, curlews can probe deep into sediment and explore the complex tunnels and pathways made by buried worms and shellfish far more easily than a straight bill would allow. Straight-billed wading birds, like godwits and oystercatchers, rapidly jab into the sediment and take their prey by surprise. Curlews do it differently; they plunge deep and use the bulbous, sensitive tip to feel around. The nerve-filled end of the bill opens independently, the tips acting like a pair of remote-controlled tweezers. This is made possible by joints in the skull which can push the upper bill forwards so that it can act alone. With its finger-tip sensitivity it is remarkably good at detecting deeply buried food. It is also ideal for poking around in the surface nooks and crannies of a rocky shore. The length allows access to food out of reach to those less endowed in the bill department.

Curves have their disadvantages, though. Structurally, they are weaker than straight bills and have to be strengthened by internal struts and thickenings. The reinforcements narrow the internal passage so that a curlew’s tongue can’t reach down to the tip to help extract and swallow buried food. It has to withdraw its bill and then move the food to the tongue by jerking its head. Big prey, such as crabs, are winkled from their hiding places and tossed around, often violently, before being swallowed. You can see curlews shaking them so hard their legs fall off (the crab’s legs, not the curlew’s) before they are moved to the top of the bill and down the gullet.

The prominence of the bill has, inevitably, set our imaginations whirring. In some areas, a local name for curlews is whaup, partly referring to the sound of one of its calls, but also because it evoked folk memories of those half-human, malevolent little people that plagued generations gone by. A whaup was an evil, long-nosed, thin-necked goblin that ran around the roofs of houses at night. They were notoriously mischievous and spread rumours and bad luck. ‘A whaup in the nest’ refers to some brewing unpleasantness, or the hatching of evil plans. A Scottish Highlander’s prayer asks to be protected from ‘witches, warlocks and long-nebbed (nosed) things’. The curlew became synonymous with these negative notions and in some places it became a bird to be feared. A long bill, finely tuned by evolution for feeding in muddy environments, must also, it seems, give rise to unfortunate connections with our complex, cultural world.

A curlew’s bill may be the feature that catches our eye, but when it opens and starts broadcasting, it is the sound that captures our soul. The experience of hearing the call of the curlew is, for me, akin to what C.S. Lewis described as being ‘surprised by joy’. For Lewis, joy is not merely happiness, it is far deeper and unfathomable. He describes it as an unexpected, centuries-old upwelling of longing and desire that has somehow always been there but has remained unnamed. It is usually fleeting, overwhelming, always complicated, always layered. It has associations with memories that we can never quite define. ‘All Joy reminds,’ says Lewis. ‘It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’4 The late Terry Pratchett, in A Hat Full of Sky, had an earthier turn of phrase: ‘Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. A feeling inside that can hardly be contained.’ This is the surprising joy evoked by the varied calls of the curlew, whether it is the bubbling mating song tumbling in cadences from a summer sky, or the simpler, arrowed sound of its name, firing across the reaches of a mudflat in winter. Pure, unmitigated joy.

Curlews are highly vocal and have something to say in most situations. Their calls range from harsh barking and yelping to growling and soft, low whistles – and much else in between. They have specific sounds to communicate with developing chicks inside the egg, to call their mate to warn of danger, to scare away predators and to mark their territory. The signature call, the one from which the bird gets its name, is coorli or curlee, which is often heard as the bird takes flight over moorland and estuary. ‘Lancing their voices/through the skin of this light’,5 as Ted Hughes described this soul-aching cry that lingers in the air long after the bird has flown. If you imagine the shape of the call as a word, it is also curved. The ending of curlee rises in tone, similar to the pen-stroke flourish of a flamboyant scribe. Both the call of the curlew and its bill are curlicued.

But perhaps the most haunting song is a melody that can lighten even the most desolate of days – the bubbling call, most often heard in the breeding season. It is a gradually building trail of notes that rises up through the scale, sounding louder and ever more urgent as the bird flies skywards. As the call ends, the curlew then swoops through the air on stiffened wings. One anonymous poet described it as:

A crescendo of

sound bubbles

bursting in cadences

of liquid joy.

The cry bursts forth from the bird’s lungs through its binary voice box – two tubes that work in harmony to produce a richness of tone that intertwines both the major and minor keys, confusing our emotions. The bubbling call is ecstatic, both full of life but with deeply melancholic undertones. ‘Such trifling themes as life and death are kept in Curlew’s calls …’ wrote A.W. Bullen in his poem ‘Curlews’. ‘If my voice could be anything like theirs … if only … I would swallow my share of lugworms to know their truths …’

Lord Edward Grey, ornithologist and politician, found a sense of calm and hope in the music of the new moon bird:

Of all bird songs or sounds known to me there is none that I would prefer than the spring notes of the Curlew … The notes do not sound passionate, they suggest peace, rest, healing joy, an assurance of happiness past, present and to come. To listen to Curlews on a bright, clear April day, with the fullness of spring still in anticipation, is one of the best experiences that a lover of birds can have.6

For many, to hear a curlew is to listen to the wild. It is music that crystallises the range of emotions that well to the surface when standing on a lonely moor or walking through a spring meadow. Like adding seasoning to a dish, their calls add highlights or depth to the landscape. You might hear the ‘sweet crystalline cry’ recorded by W.B. Yeats, or perhaps the more melancholic ‘lingering, threadbare cry’ noted by another Irish poet, Thomas Kinsella. Alfred, Lord Tennyson only heard bleakness and described calling curlews as ‘Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall.’ You may, though, feel happiness and hear Ted Hughes’ ‘wobbling water-call’ and smile.

Curlews are shape-shifting sprites that tease and tangle our emotions. Their evocative cries are aural keys that unlock our secret thoughts, and have inspired poets, artists, writers and musicians from time immemorial – and still do. This is perhaps all the more remarkable, given that their appearance is relatively unprepossessing. Looking past their beak, their colouring is less than striking. From a distance, they may even seem a little dowdy. But as with many works of art, the true beauty is discovered in the detail. At close quarters, the intricate patterning of brown, grey and cream feathers is exquisite, shimmering with the rippling tide or merging into the bright colours of a flower-filled meadow. Rain, cloud or sun bestow different characteristics. But to see the loveliness in curlews requires more than a passing glance.

G.K. Chesterton understood that what can appear dull on the surface often belies a shifting palette. When challenged about the drabness of grey as a colour, he asks us to consider an English village on a dull day. To some it may seem boring, but watch a while and it is a wealth of charm. ‘Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are perpetually touching it and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to ivory … The little hamlets of the warm grey stone have a geniality which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbs.’ This can only be seen by taking enough time to absorb the ever-changing delights. So too with curlews; to watch them in rain or sunshine, at dawn or dusk, is to see a restless beauty adorning a muddy marsh.

While many creative juices have flowed at the sight and sound of curlews, many gastric ones have, too. Being the UK’s largest wading bird, they have provided flesh for the pot for centuries. It is illegal to hunt them now, but before they were protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, it was said that the best time of year to eat them was soon after the breeding season. Weeks of feeding on insects and berries was thought to make their flesh sweet. According to one old Cornish recipe, this was the ideal time to make curlew pie, which required mincing up two birds with onions. Eaten later in the year, warned the chef, their flesh would be rank with the flavour of mud and shellfish, and will need more herbs to disguise the taste.

Winston Graham, the writer of the Poldark series, also refers to curlew pie being served in a pub in his novel The Loving Cup: A Novel of Cornwall 1813–1815. A seventeenth-century Lincolnshire proverb puts a price on them, and they weren’t cheap: ‘Be she lean or be she fat, a curlew has twelve pence on her back.’ Some versions change lean and fat to white or black, as it was thought the plumage of curlews darkens in the summer, though I have never found other references to this.

In Feast Day Cookbook, written by Katherine Burton and Helmut Ripperger, published in 1951, a Christmas Day pie extravaganza is described from the days of old, but no exact date is specified:

It is said to have contained, besides the crust, the following: four geese, three rabbits, four wild ducks, two woodcocks, six snipe, four partridges, two curlews, six pigeons, seven blackbirds; and it was served on a cart built especially to hold it!

The narrator of the medieval narrative poem ‘Piers Plowman’, written by William Langland at the end of the fourteenth century, says of the curlew that it is ‘a bird whose flesh is the finest’. Curlews also put in an appearance in The Forme of Cury, one of the oldest-known manuscripts on the art of cooking in the English language. It is believed to have been written in the late fourteenth century by the head chefs of Richard II (1377–99). It is a scroll made of calfskin containing 196 recipes. The word ‘cury’ is the Middle English word for ‘cookery’, and the recipes are full of exotic spices, Mediterranean delicacies and creatures we would not dream of serving today, such as whales, seals, porpoises and cranes.

By the fifteenth century, public feasts had taken on monstrous proportions, and curlews were part of the steamed, roasted and boiled menagerie that were used to display social standing. This is an account of the feast for 2,500 people made to celebrate the enthronement of George Neville as Archbishop of York in 1465:

They consumed 4000 pigeons and 4000 crays, 2000 chickens, 204 cranes, 104 peacocks, 100 dozen quails, 400 swans, 400 herons, 113 oxen, 6 wild bulls, 608 pikes and bream, 12 porpoises and seals, 1000 sheep, 304 calves, 2000 pigs, 1000 capons, 400 plovers, 200 dozen of the birds called ‘rees’, 4000 mallards and teals, 204 kids, 204 bitterns, 200 pheasants, 500 partridges, 400 woodcocks, 100 curlews, 1000 egrets, over 500 stags, bucks and roes, 4000 cold and 1500 hot venison pies, 4000 dishes of jelly, 4000 baked tarts, 2000 hot custards with a proportionate quantity of bread, sugared delicacies and cakes. 300 tuns of ale were drunk, and 100 tuns of wine, a tun containing 252 gallons according to the usual reckoning.

According to The Booke of Goode Cookry Very Necessary for all such As Delight Therein (1584), the correct way to roast a curlew is to put its legs behind the body, cut off the wings and wind the neck so that the bill rests on the breast. Others suggest ‘letting the heads hang over the pot for show’.

In the seventeenth century, curlews baked in a pie, and also roasted, were served to King James I, and a few decades later, at the end of the century, they appear in a cookbook by Hannah Woolley, instructing servants in the correct terminology for ‘the curious art’ of carving different birds.

In cutting up small birds it is proper to say thigh them, as thigh that Woodcock, thigh that Pigeon: but as to others say, mince that Plover, wing that Quail, and wing that Partridge, allay that Pheasant, untach that Curlew, unjoint that Bittern, disfigure that Peacock, display that Crane, dismember that Heron, unbrace that Mallard, frust that Chicken, spoil that Hen, sawce that Capon, lift that Swan, reer that Goose, tire that Egg.

It is a testament to their former abundance that many a curlew will have come untached. In some areas, their eggs were also collected and served alongside the meat up until the middle of the twentieth century. Alas, that vision of a plethora of new moon birds gracing the land from the tip of Scotland to the moors of Cornwall, from Kerry to Norfolk, is a distant memory.

Over the last thirty years, numbers of curlews have declined on average by 20 per cent across the European continent, but that figure is misleading for the UK and Ireland, where losses are much higher. In their most western reaches in the Irish Republic there is nothing short of a disaster unfolding before our eyes. In the 1980s there were many thousands of pairs of nesting curlews, but today only around 120 remain. The official population for the UK is 66,000 breeding pairs, although my personal opinion is that this is optimistic and the real figure is much lower, maybe less than half that number. In Northern Ireland, for example, there has been a decline from 5,000 to 250 pairs since the 80s. The Welsh population has fallen by over 80 per cent and is now thought to be fewer than 400 breeding pairs. England and Scotland have lost around 60 per cent of breeding curlews in the last twenty years. So alarming are the figures that curlews were made a species of highest conservation concern in the UK in December 2015, and put onto the red list of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the worldwide union of conservation bodies that monitors the status of animals and plants throughout the globe. They are now in the same category as jaguars, ‘near threatened’, indicating that extinction is likely in the future.

The reasons for such dramatic declines across the board are many and varied. Farming methods, the spread of forestry, the drainage of uplands to create pasture for sheep and cows and predation of their eggs and chicks have all taken their toll, but despite the great losses not everyone has noticed they are disappearing. Curlews suffer from a problem specific to them: a distortion of our perception. The winter curlew population of 150,000, boosted by birds from Scandinavia and Finland, means that between September and February large congregations of curlews can be seen around the coast. The arrival of these continental birds gives the impression of curlew-abundance and that all is well. Come early spring, however, when the large flocks disperse, many fly back to northern Europe to breed, leaving our residents scattered increasingly thinly across Ireland and the UK.

There is no escaping the fact that curlews are failing to thrive and breed in the UK and Ireland. Year after year their numbers fall, and few of those that remain are managing to breed successfully in an increasingly hostile landscape. With precious few youngsters surviving to take the place of the older birds, the trajectory is resolutely downhill.

The transition of curlews to high conservation status in December 2015 was the trigger for me to follow them more closely. It was then that the idea of a 500-mile journey on foot began to crystallise and became a concrete plan. This would be no aimless wander but a pilgrimage, an inner and outer journey that has a goal. It would follow a definite line across the countries at the far western edge of the range of the Eurasian Curlew, a path that, as far as I could discern, was unique. Walking was by far the best way for me to track these increasingly elusive birds; it allows time to connect with the landscape and feel its character, something that cannot be achieved in a car. I would start in the early spring when birds were first arriving on their breeding grounds in the west of Ireland, then continue through the heart of Ireland to Dublin. I would then sail to Wales, arriving as incubation was well under way. After travelling through Wales I would arrive in England to coincide with the first hatching of chicks. Six weeks after setting out, I would finish on the East Anglian coast as the fledglings were beginning to try out their wings. Here I would mark the place where many curlews would come to spend the winter.

This would be a journey of many layers. A geographical one from west to east through the variety of landscapes that range across Ireland and the UK, places that are at once familiar and yet still mysterious. I wanted to see where the birds are surviving, but also experience their absence from the fields that no longer host their songs. It would be a walk through a year in the life of curlews. I would watch them displaying to their mates, soaring on fresh winds over fields just emerging from winter, and then I would search for their hidden nests in meadows and on moorland. If I was lucky, I would see their young, all feet and feathers and beady eyes. This would also be an artistic journey to explore the many connections that curlews have to poetry, literature, art and music, both in the past and today. But, most of all, I wanted to really understand what it is that is edging them closer to extinction, the environmental problems that are so huge that we are in real danger of losing them as a breeding bird across Ireland and the UK.

All this I decided at the start of 2016, when curlews were still on winter-cold estuaries and coasts. This is when they are easiest to see, gathered together for safety on mudflats, beaches or wet coastal grasslands. It would be a chance to think about the walk ahead, surrounded by the birds that mean so much to me. The nineteenth-century poet Helen Maria Williams wrote in her poem, ‘To the Curlew’:

Soothed by the murmurs of the sea-beat shore,

His dun-grey plumage floating to the gale,

The Curlew blends his melancholy wail,

With those hoarse sounds the rushing waters pour.

And so I started the year where the walk would end – on the east coast of England.

Chapter 2

BEGINNING AT THE END

The rain barely stopped falling throughout the winter that saw a wet 2015 turn into a soaking 2016. That December was the warmest and wettest ever recorded for the UK. By early January, large swathes of northern England were underwater. Thousands of people were soaked in misery, made worse by the filibustering of politicians. Further south and east, Norfolk was, thankfully, not so badly affected, but it was still drizzly and the ground sodden. This area is famous for its water. Once a giant wetland, it was drained in the seventeenth century to turn large swathes of it into more productive farmland. Now, ramrod rows of poplar and Leylandii puncture the horizon, and deep, straight dykes define the edges of large fields. They seem to stretch as far as the eye can see. Much of the land is below sea level, in some places by nearly three metres. It can be disconcerting to contemplate that the low wall along the coast seems to be all that stops the North Sea piling in on top of you.

The north Norfolk coast is separated from southern Lincolnshire by The Wash, over 15 well-defined square miles of shallow sea and tidal mudflat. Four rivers – the Whitham, the Welland, the Nene and the Great Ouse – flow into the North Sea here, depositing tonnes of sediment. When the tide is out this vast expanse of worm-filled, shellfish-rich mud forms one of the most important feeding areas for waterbirds in Europe. In winter, it is filled with avian life from all over the continent – 350,000 birds at any one time, and as many as 9,000 curlews.

As soon as I arrive in Norfolk I head for one small section of The Wash, the RSPB nature reserve in Snettisham, on the coast. The whole day has been mild and damp, everything about it redolent of wet, musty sacks. By mid-afternoon, the light is already losing its sharpness, slipping into that unsettling, crepuscular zone between thin winter light and cold darkness. In mid-winter this comes so early in the day it feels like theft.

Through binoculars, shapes reveal themselves to be a ‘herd’ of around thirty curlews. Herd is one of the collective nouns, and is not a bad description, as winter flocks generally move together and take flight as a group. The other collective is a near homograph: a curfew of curlews, possibly relating to their gathering at dusk.

Like sewing machines stitching the sky to the Earth with invisible threads, the curlews prod the ground and generally move in the same direction. They form a fragile alliance. Though focused on finding food, their nervousness is palpable. Perhaps being watched stirs some ancestral memory of being legal quarry in England before 1981, when they were regularly shot on their wintering grounds. Birdwatchers say that they are noticeably more tense in areas where they were once hunted, and Norfolk is one such place. Some call softly, a whistling sound that floats over the damp air, soothing to the ear and a balm for the soul.

My small camera is balanced on a fence post to keep it steady at maximum zoom. The picture is boring, the birds are too far away, but the sound alone fills the screen. But as I press the ON button, right on cue, the throaty rumble of a microlight edges into the soundscape and rapidly becomes a roar. Within seconds it drowns out the music of the field. The giant petrol-powered set of wings takes an age to move along. If only the creators of the combustion engine could have made it sound like a wind harp or grand piano, maybe even a xylophone. Anything would be preferable to this grating, intrusive drone that fills the sky for what seems like hours.

In any case, the moment is lost. The curlews take flight, piping as they make their way towards the sea. And perhaps the microlight isn’t entirely to blame; it is just as likely the birds can feel the shifting tide in every cell of their bodies and register the failing light as a signal to move on to a safer place for the night. I pack up and follow them.

Mud and ankle-deep puddles form the narrow path to the shingle ridge that overlooks the vast expanse of shimmering tidal flats. It offers up a strange and beautiful sight. Channels of water meander across the exposed mud, silvery sinews on a dark surface, at times taking on the sheen of mother of pearl. There seems no end to the mud; it stretches on and on towards the darkening horizon, rippled and ruffled by the water, strangely enticing and mysterious. Even the thousands of birds here are dwarfed by the vastness of the estuary. The air is filled with bird calls and a caustic, rich smell. The curlews are out there somewhere, a part of this mighty throng, big and small.

Bulky shelduck patrol the surface of the mud like avian minesweepers, their distinctive upturned bills swishing to and fro, scooping up tiny molluscs. Pink-footed geese stream in from feeding in fields: an airborne, honking choir. Neurotic redshanks strut and fuss, then take fright at the slightest disturbance, sailing into the air, emitting their high-pitched wails. The ‘Sentinel of the Marshes’ they are called, the first to warn of danger; red-legged bird versions of Lance Corporal Jack Jones in Dad’s Army – ‘Don’t panic!’

The real star of The Wash winter show is the knot. Thousands of small brown and white waders seem to be held together by magnets. They rise as one, twisting and spiralling through the sky, like a creature in agony. The display confounds predators and mesmerises humans.

The sea creeps closer, pushing the birds towards the shore. They bunch together like commuters on a constantly dwindling platform. On days when the tide is very high, they can run out of space completely and tens of thousands take to the air and stream inland. You can find yourself standing beneath an aerial river of birds. It is one of the greatest wildlife spectacles that Britain has to offer. But today there is only a middling tide, and the birds stay on the seaward side of the wall.

Just a handful of us birdwatchers are dotted along the shore, each alone with our own thoughts, bathed in evening light and surround sound of calling waterfowl. I am imagining how different this will all seem in six months’ time, at the end of May. I will arrive on this eastern coast footsore and tired after six weeks on the road. There will be greenery and leafy trees, warm air and the hum of insects. The sun still high in the sky. There will also be far fewer birds. All being well, curlews should still be on their breeding grounds and guarding their growing families. If they manage to hatch young they will be kept busy until late summer. If not, if they fail to find a suitable nesting site, or if predators eat their eggs and chicks, they will already be gathering into small flocks, preparing for winter once more. The pattern of previous years doesn’t bode well. For most curlews in large parts of Britain and Ireland, far too many will, yet again, gain the depressing title of ‘failed breeders’ and arrive back on the coast way ahead of time. They will have lost the chance to produce young once more. The world is an increasingly uncertain place for them, as it is for many other birds.

All over the Earth the great pendulum of bird life swings to and fro in time to the beat of the seasons. Some migrants are well studied, but others are only just revealing their secrets as different kinds of tracking devices are developed and become smaller, lighter and more reliable. Hopefully, we will learn more about curlews in the future. It is amazing how little we know about their lives, particularly considering they were once so numerous and widespread. The everyday rarely gets the attention it deserves, until, that is, it becomes increasingly hard to find.

Organic farmer, naturalist and former wildlife camerawoman, Rebecca Hosking, described to me on Facebook her experience of catching a glimpse of winter curlew in Devon:

The north winds blew a pair of curlew to the farm this morning. Their unmistakable calls rooted me to the spot, as I watched them spiral downward to feed in one of the lower meadows. To me, their cry is the essence of wildness, both haunting and beguiling. I was astonished at the level of emotion those bubbling trills invoked. Pure joy and excitement, for this was the first time I’ve ever heard them at Modbury. Yet that joy soon turned to sorrow and lament, knowing how drastic their decline has been. My knee-jerk reaction was to run and find Dad so he too could hear. As we stood in the garden listening, the pair lifted back to the sky, calling their plaintive, lonely ‘cour-leees’ as they circled overhead. I looked across at Dad to see his reaction; his eyes were beginning to well, ‘I haven’t heard that bird in this valley in over 40 years,’ he said. We watched them slowly reel their way towards the coast, until they flew out of sight.

A fifth of Europe’s curlews visit the coasts and estuaries of the UK and Ireland in the winter, a number that is steadily declining. It is an awesome responsibility to hold the fate of these world travellers in our hands. Although most of the birds are unstudied, there are some hotspots for research, and The Wash Wader Ringing Group has been busy fitting identification rings onto the legs of curlews for decades. It has amassed some interesting results. Most of The Wash curlews breed in Scandinavia, France and Germany; only 25 per cent are British birds that stay all year round. Some visitors travel a long way. One curlew ringed in The Wash in September 2000 was shot in Russia the following May, over 2,000 miles away. It was fifteen years old. Surprisingly, this is only middle-aged. A bird caught in Lincolnshire in 2015 was twenty-nine, nearly matching the record for longevity which goes to one found dead in the Wirral in 2011 at the grand old age of thirty-two.

Thankfully, more projects are getting under way to understand the lives of these wonderful birds. In the weeks leading up to my walk I wanted to find out more about winter curlews, and so in early February I made my way to the northeast coast of Scotland, to the Moray Firth, where I had been told interesting things were happening.

I arrive to bright sunshine and a clear blue sky. A period of glorious winter weather is gracing eastern Scotland. After a few hours of searching, Bob Swann and I find curlews roosting on Bunchrew Bay, near Inverness, on the Beauly Firth. Bob is a retired teacher, wiry and strong, passionate about nature and with an encyclopaedic knowledge about sea birds in particular. He is a legend in the world of Scottish bird ringing, and along with others in the Highland Ringing Group, has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of bird life. I couldn’t be in better company.

The Moray Firth is another important wintering site for many species of wading birds. Numbers in excess of 36,000 spend the winter in and around its many inlets and lochs. Dunlin, redshank, golden plover, lapwing, ringed plover, sanderling, purple sandpiper and knot join curlew here, many coming over from Scandinavia. The Highland Ringing Group has been monitoring numbers and fitting identification rings onto the legs of curlews for many years. The results show that all of the curlews wintering in the Moray Firth are either Scottish or Scandinavian birds. Overall, there are more males than females (58 per cent male to 42 per cent female), and some specific sites are predominantly male. Very few juveniles have been ringed, only 4 per cent, indicating that either they roost elsewhere or, far more worryingly, there are very few around to ring. Over the years birds have either been spotted or re-caught in the same places. The Scottish curlews – and it seems to be the same everywhere – are very much creatures of habit, returning year on year to the same places.

A simple identification ring fitted onto a bird’s leg is one way of getting information about an individual, but as technology advances we are able to resolve mysteries about their lives – which was impossible before this digital, data-streaming age. For example, as tracking technology gets smaller and lighter, we can now vicariously tag along on the journeys they make throughout the year. On 31 March 2009 Bob was part of a team that caught a female curlew at Bunchrew Bay and fixed a satellite transmitter to feathers on her back. It is rather cumbersome-looking with a long antenna attached to a small black box (a couple of centimetres squared), but it is light and only in place for a few months since it falls off when the feathers moult in the autumn. As the bird was caught at the end of March, the suspicion was that this was a Scandinavian female. We know that curlews breeding in northern Europe remain on their Scottish wintering grounds longer than local birds, waiting for milder weather to melt the frozen northern lands. By the middle of March, British birds are already on the hills, preparing to nest.

Once she set off, the transmitter sent back data every few days over the spring and summer. Technology now allowed the Highland Ringing Group to track one bird’s annual migration through data streamed to a computer screen.

The female left Scotland in mid-April and flew over the middle of Norway, passing through a gap in the mountains. After a few days’ rest in Sweden, on the Gulf of Bothnia, the data then showed a flight across to Finland. For fifty-three days she was stationary, long enough to nest and raise young. The return trip to Scotland took a different route via the southern tip of Norway, before crossing over the North Sea to arrive north of Aberdeen by 1 July. Eventually, by 5 July, the female arrived back where she started, on the Beauly Firth.1 Thus we have a circular migration, not a straight line back and forth, showing that curlews depend on vast areas to support them through the year and all these places are important for their survival. It’s interesting that the satellite transmitter confirmed that this curlew was away from Scotland for no more than three months of the year, highlighting that the birds we call ‘northern European’ are actually spending three-quarters of their time in the UK. Protecting wintering areas around our shores is therefore just as important as safeguarding their nesting sites.

The project provided an insight into the year of just one curlew, so plans have been drawn up to expand the database. The next phase, which I was here to see, involved catching many more curlews and fixing smaller, cheaper devices, called geolocators, to the rings on their legs. These marvels of technology collect data and store it onboard the locator, rather than constantly streaming it back to a computer. Geolocators record light levels so that sunrise and sunset can be worked out and the birds’ positions identified. Cheap and less cumbersome, for sure, but in order to retrieve the data the same birds have to be recaptured later in the year and the geolocator removed, although, as curlews are so site-faithful, that is not such a tall order as it sounds.

The first step involves catching lots of curlews. If you are not au fait with cannon netting, and just happen to come across it in action, you might think something heinous is going on. It involves laying explosives, creeping about in the dark, setting off very loud bangs and trapping frightened birds under nets, but it is all for a good cause.

The proposed curlew catch on Bunchrew Bay requires preparation. A long net, with two firing cannons attached to the ends, is buried in the beach where the curlews are known to roost overnight. The detonator is hidden in bushes and attached to the cannons by long cables. When the birds are standing peacefully, the explosives will be detonated and the net will shoot into the air and over their heads, trapping them underneath. They will then be put into holding pens and the geolocators attached.

After a few hours of lugging and digging, everything is set for the next morning.

I leave the guesthouse before dawn; a hard frost covers cars and pavements. Scotland glistens under the streetlights as I drive to meet Bob and his ringing colleagues by the beach. Most of the group, like Bob, are retired, field-fit, passionate bird lovers. The birds are exactly where we hoped they would be, so if all goes well, we’ll have a large catch. Bob, with walky-talky and binoculars, creeps to the far side of the beach and into the bush with the detonator. The rest of us move quietly to the other side to hide in a small patch of woodland. As Bob sends updates about the birds’ position, we sort out who can run the fastest. Once the cannons have been fired, speed will be essential. The quickest sprinters will leave the bags and equipment with the slower ones, then race ahead to retrieve the birds from under the net. The birds would be panicking, so getting them to the safety of the holding pens is vital. This is where I feel I can contribute. Having run a few half-marathons, and being a keen gym-goer and jogger, I confidently put myself forward to go with the advance party. After what seems like an age of whispering and walky-talky instructions, Bob counts down. Five, four, three, two, one – FIRE! An enormous bang shatters the early morning air, followed immediately by alarm-calling birds. RUN! I race off at full speed. My fellow sprinters streak ahead so fast Mo Farah would struggle to keep up. I arrive only just ahead of the ‘slower’ group, who have had to transport all the bags. But there is no time to soothe my bruised ego …

Retrieving the trapped birds is fast and efficient. This well-oiled machine of seasoned bird ringers has been through this routine many times. The birds settle quickly. In all, over a hundred have been caught. The list reads: one wigeon, four teal, one oystercatcher, eight curlew, two dunlin, seventy-four redshank, thirteen black-headed and three common gulls. All are weighed, aged, measured, ringed and released. The curlews also have their geolocators fitted, and, for the first time, I get to hold a curlew in my hands.

Not surprisingly for wild creatures, some species of bird will peck and struggle when held. The more pointed the talons, or sharp the bill, the greater the caution needed. They glare fiercely at their captor with rage or terror. Some are notoriously vicious, like the sea-cliff-dwelling razorbills (the clue is in the name). Curlews, however, don’t do histrionics. Despite having a bill that could take your eye out, they simply sink into your hands and have a look around. They are gentle captives and exude a Buddha-like calm. It is as though being cradled in our hands takes away the pressure for survival for a short while. I am sure this is far from the truth, but the impression they give is one of serenity, not panic.

It is a special, life-giving moment to be so close to birds that I have loved and admired for so long. As I cradle them one at a time, I feel their hearts beat fast but steady. Under their soft feathers, they are warm and surprisingly fragile. We look each other in the eye and I fancy there is a connection. I stop short of giving each one a soft kiss on the head – that is way too infra dig in front of the Highland Ringing Group.

By mid-morning each bird has been released into the bright sunshine and the cold, fresh air. As they fly away I wish them well and hope they come back in the autumn so that the geolocators can be retrieved and reveal their secrets. The curlews call out their characteristic ‘curlee’ as they wheel down the beach. I worry that the exploding net and human handling might have traumatised them, but, reassuringly, after some indignant shaking, each one starts feeding. By the time we have packed up, the beach is once again calm, as though nothing has happened. Months of waiting now lie ahead before the birds return in the autumn and the cannon nets are laid out again.

Cannon netting might seem dramatic but it is a useful tool for birds like curlews that are hard to catch in any other way; and its use is spreading. Two weeks later, at the end of February, I find myself once again stumbling through woodland in semi-darkness. This time it was to find out more about a new inland cannon netting project in the Yorkshire Dales.

It is late afternoon and I am following (or trying to follow) a silent, stealthy, ex-army officer who barely cracks a twig as he moves through the shadows with ease. His training with the Irish Guards, and a Military Cross for bravery in Iraq, are obviously useful for birding. He floats over the ground and uses the tree trunks as cover. I, on the other hand, fall over every root, get snared on brambles and catch my rucksack on most overhead branches. I can barely see a thing.

Tom Orde-Powlett is in his late thirties, and retired from the army to help run the family business, which happens to involve the upkeep of a medieval castle and a 6000-acre grouse moor. For six centuries his ancestors have owned and managed Bolton Castle Estate. He also has four small children, so life is busy. Tom, though, is fired with a passion for birds and is involved in all kinds of ringing and monitoring projects around the area. I will return to the grouse moor later in the year, but this visit is to see the large number of curlews that winter in the fields along the River Ure, which tumbles through the valley below the castle. Most curlews in the UK winter on the coast, but some come inland to places like this in quite large numbers. A few hundred birds are known to spend the winter in Wensleydale, making the most of the rough, wet fields below the hills. This is a stunningly beautiful part of England. On this wintry day, the elongated, smooth moors are dusted with snow and produce stark, white wedges against a pale blue sky. England is a crowded country, but the Yorkshire Dales feel wide open and sparse. There is space to breathe.

The light is fading fast. The fourteenth-century fortress that once hosted the fugitive Mary Queen of Scots looms above us, dark and brooding. Tom leads the way through the small shelterbelt of conifers to the edge of the field where a hundred or so curlews often roost overnight. There is no cannon netting tonight; this is a reconnaissance trip to check their location. We settle on a log, telescopes ready, and chat quietly. Little is known about these Yorkshire birds. Do they breed on local hills or have they come from far away? Are they a mixture of sexes and ages? One theory suggests curlews that winter inland may be predominantly males, as their shorter bills are more suited to reaching food in wet, soft soil. The females, with their longer bills, are more adept at extracting food from sandy, muddy shores and rocky coasts. No one knows for sure, and so Tom, with the help of local nature groups, is trying to find out. In January, over forty birds had been caught using cannon nets and each bird was given a unique set of coloured bands for identification. While the rings were being fitted the birds were also weighed and measured. The majority were found to be male, supporting the theory that the sexes may separate to some extent in winter. More cannon netting is being planned, but in the meantime it is important to keep a lookout for birds already ringed. Once spring arrives it might be possible to see where they nest, or to hope for reported sightings if they are breeding elsewhere.

There is something tinglingly magical about woodlands, even small patches like this, in the half-light of a winter evening. They are steadfast and full of expectation; there is a sense of a change of shift from day to night, from the known, visible world to the realm of covert creatures that move in shadows. After the wet, warm winter the rotting leaves and rich soil give off a primeval, earthy smell. As a cold wind buffets the valley, the trees provide a sense of calm. I feel I am wrapped in a woody blanket.

A lacework of bare hedges defines the large field ahead. The ground is sodden and an area of standing water in the middle reflects the grey and pink sky. After a short time, the calls of curlews drift in from the distance. They sail overhead, landing by the water, touching down like fighter planes. Their long, pointed wings tilt to kill the lift and slow momentum. Their heads and necks stretch out and downwards, and their long legs, with pointed toes, dangle below. They delicately touch the earth. At first just a few arrive, then they are joined by more and more. They whistle and call to each other and begin to feed in a herd of about eighty birds, moving first one way, then turning and walking back. A brown hare appears in the background, sniffs the cold wind and lopes away. Occasionally, one curlew rises into the air and sings a succession of ascending notes before floating back to the group. They are trying out their mating displays, and seem restless. Something is stirring in the February air; the approaching spring seems to be awakening their instincts.

Despite the cold, short days, winter is coming to an end. The world is on the cusp of change. Birdsong becomes louder and more musical, more earnest. Buds bulge and green shoots have more vigour. The curlews feel it. Their migration to their summer grounds is about to begin. It will be a staged journey, not a direct flight. Very soon this group in Wensleydale will split up and head to the same breeding grounds they have always gone to. These are birds of routine and faithfulness. They will stop for a few days in the same fields, in fact the same spot in the same fields, calling and displaying, searching each other out, always heading closer to their final nesting place.

Most of the Wensleydale curlews might not have far to go. It is likely they spread out over the surrounding moors and upland farms. Others, though, could travel hundreds of miles. Previous studies suggest some birds may head to Teesdale before heading out to Scandinavia. This new ringing project will help fill in some of the gaps, and I left Tom with plans to return when the birds are nesting and the valleys and moors are burgeoning with life. I drove back to Bristol with a mind full of wintery new moon birds singing in a grey, flooded field.

As the seasons shift, so too do the winds around the Earth and the currents in the sea. Movements in air and water bring a fresh energy to a winter-weary world. That energy can bring new life and new generations – but it can also be lethal. Gales, fog, heavy rain and storms can hit just when the birds are on the wing.

On an unusually foggy, cold night, on 9 March 1911, there was ‘a tremendous night of Curlew cries over Dublin’.2 Thousands of birds of different species – including curlews, thrushes, starlings, robins and skylarks – were ‘streaming over the south and east coasts of Ireland, heading north. They were exhausted and disorientated.’ One man near Waterford recorded, ‘The whole bird creation was astir and the people of the town were kept awake by the shriek of the Curlew, Duck and Snipe hovering over the town.’ A ship’s captain reported ‘millions of birds’ alighting on his ship. ‘Amongst them was a number of curlews.’ Lighthouse keepers told of birds crying and wheeling around the lanterns in the dead of night. A certain Mr Fanning was awoken from his sleep and wrote, ‘Curlew were heard calling continuously over the town of Lismore … the air was full of them. The nights were dark and foggy, and the birds kept hovering over towns where gas-lamps were lighted.’ And in Carlow, ‘the sky was almost obscured by vast numbers of Curlew and Starling … The streets were practically littered in the morning with the bodies of dead birds.’ Another report describes a man out walking at midnight and finding curlews, ‘walking up and down the flat bank at the side of the river, screaming piteously.’ It must have been a tragic and disturbing sight.

Returning to their breeding grounds from wintering in southern Europe, these poor creatures seem to have been caught out by extreme and unusual weather. Having been held back for longer than normal by intense cold across the continent, the temperature across France suddenly rose, accompanied by a change in wind direction. The birds took their chance and left en masse, but what the birds didn’t know was that Britain and Ireland were still in the grip of a deep freeze. As warm continental air hit the cold air over the North Sea, a bank of fog extended 30 miles from the coast and conditions were made worse by a waning moon, providing very little light. Cold, exhausted and disorientated, the birds made for any light source they could find, hence their landing on ships and lighthouses. Thousands died.

Bad weather during migration is not uncommon, but extreme events like this are, thankfully, rare. However, migration is always dangerous. Hunting and lack of food at stop-over sites make a hazardous journey far worse. Yet, still, the urge to fly to far away lands full of insects and good nesting areas is strong; it is an instinct that is impossible to resist.

The shift from winter to early spring was making me restless, too. The date set for the start of my long walk, 21 April, was just a few weeks away. It was time to plan my own, hopefully far less perilous, journey to Ireland.

Chapter 3

ARRIVING IN IRELAND

On a day when the curlew returns,

Its cry circling the moor,

Suddenly, to the man

In love with time, the whole land

Is the poem he will never write,

Birth cry, love song, threnody

Woven in voices of the living

And voices of the dead.1

I travelled to Ireland on 17 April, a few days earlier than the start date of my walk, for two reasons. I wanted to visit County Antrim to see an RSPB project working to restore curlews to the uplands, which now host just a remnant population. The other reason was personal. I spent many childhood holidays in Northern Ireland, as my mother was born into a large Catholic family in Enniskillen. Her death in April 2015, just a year before, gave the start of the walk added poignancy. I would begin my odyssey in a place she had loved, and I wanted time to say goodbye.

My mother lived in England all her married life. As the only one of six siblings to leave Ireland, she held tight to her roots. The religious division and social injustice that blighted the lives of so many in Northern Ireland erupted into thirty years of war in The Troubles. On frequent visits during the 1970s and 80s, it seemed that every street corner was festooned with either the Union Jack or the Irish tricolour, flapping defiantly in the rain-soaked wind. My mother had a life-long loathing of national flags. To her unending credit, even in the darkest days of The Troubles, she never tolerated any taking of sides. She was steadfast in her view that evil was evil no matter who perpetrated it, even though those years of horror profoundly affected her own family. She understood what drove people to extremes. She recognised the inner strength of the ‘ordinary’ people of Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, and the rich cultures that shaped their experiences.

For my own part, life with a fiery Irish Catholic mother and a quiet, intellectual father, a Church of England doctor whose soul was rooted in the hard work and grit of the industrial Midlands, made for an interesting background to family life. My mother’s Irish-Catholic view of the world, full of compassion and ritual, complexity and contradiction, merged with my father’s gentle, measured Anglican stance. It was an unusual combination. And then, strangely, curlews appear in the middle of it all. As is often the case, separate strands of life can suddenly and unexpectedly weave together. Grief for my mother and hope for the future of a bird gave an emotional depth to the start of the New Moon Walk.

It is a cold, still dawn as the ferry draws closer to Belfast. Over one thousand years earlier, an Anglo-Saxon seafarer had written a poem about the hazards of crossing northern seas in an open boat. Storms swept over the deck, sleet and snow chilled his bones, and his ship:

Hung about with icicles,

Hail flew in showers.

There I heard nothing

but the roaring sea,

the ice cold wave.2

The prosaic truth about my crossing, however, is that my Liverpool to Belfast sailing was more like crossing a mill pond, and far from my feet being, ‘bound by frosts in cold clasps’, the boat was overly warm and the bar a little too noisy. ‘I take my gladness in the … sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men,’ the ancient sailor had written, feeling lonely and uncertain on his gale-ridden sea. I did share that in common with him. I have ears only for the call of curlews, a curlew earworm, overriding the muzak and the chatter in the restaurant. Mind you, had the ferry been more akin to an Anglo-Saxon ship I might have been more prepared for the wintry blasts that strip the skin from your body in County Antrim.

Stretching north from Belfast is an area of high plateau cut through by valleys, or glens as they are more commonly called. Even today, many of the higher reaches of Antrim are remote. Glenwherry, in the heart of upland Antrim, is my first stop before heading out to Enniskillen. Sitting at around 400 metres, this is a landscape of bog and rough pasture dominated by an extinct volcano – Slemish Mountain – a giant Celtic beast crouched on bogland.

Glenwherry gets its fair share of rain – lots and lots of rain – and on the day of my visit this is mixed with sleet. It is easy to imagine how glaciers up to a mile high bore down on this land 30,000 years ago, their icy fingers prising open every crack in the rocks and tearing out boulders like flesh off a bone. When the climate began to warm and the glaciers retreated about 12,000 years ago, the land that reappeared from beneath the ice had been stripped of life and was scarred, bare and exhausted. But, slowly, vegetation and wildlife returned.

Over the millennia that followed, Ireland was colonised by hunter-gatherers and then farmers, expanding westwards from mainland Britain and Europe. The great forests were cut down as agriculture spread. The climate continued to change, and after long periods of warmth and low rainfall it became increasingly colder and wetter. Upland soils were leached of their nutrients and became acidic. From 4,500 years ago, bogs began to form across Ireland. In many places farming was abandoned until iron tools allowed these sodden, poor soils to be worked again. The hopes and beliefs of these early Irish people are writ large across the landscape in the form of tombs, dolmens and standing stones. As Christianity spread, these made way for churches as the modern spiritual expression of local communities.

In 1832 Lieutenant Robert Botler noted that the last wolf in Ireland was seen in Glenwherry in the seventeenth century. No doubt it cut a lonely figure, stressed and hungry in a hostile land. Standing here today, I could be on a film set for Sherlock Holmes’ The Hound of the Baskervilles. Through the grey, low cloud I can easily visualise a slinking form circling a stone sheep enclosure, providing scant protection from a beast ravaged by hunger. The wolf record is given added credence by an adjacent area of peat land called Wolf Bog, now home to five wind turbines.

In 1836 James Boyle wrote in his memoirs that the people who lived here were kind, shrewd, hard-working descendants of Scottish Presbyterians and Calvinists. They were livestock farmers, and their occupation is carried on to this day. In a land where rain and gales sweep in from the west for much of the year, it is the only practical option; growing crops is well nigh impossible. While Boyle admired the upright grittiness of the people, he was somewhat less inspired by the landscape:

The valley of Glenwherry is wild and mountainous, presenting no variety of scenery, either in its natural or artificial state, destitute of planting or hedgerows, its steep but smooth sides mountainous but presenting nothing bold or striking in their forms, being in fact, except along the banks of the river, one unvaried and uncultivated waste. At the western end of the parish the scenery is not so wild and there is more cultivation, but proceeding towards the eastern end of the glen the scenery becomes wild, dreary and uninteresting.3

Glenwherry was, and still is, a tough place to live.

Place names can tell us much about the past character and wildlife of an area. In England, former animal denizens are recorded as Buckfast and Wolford, for example. Others are more obscure, such as Birkenhead, meaning the headland where birch trees grow. In Northern Ireland, Doire, or Derry, means oak grove, and Cúil Raithin, the town of Coleraine, is a place of many ferns. Laios na n Gealbhán, or Lisnaglevin, means ‘fort of the sparrows’. Cranfield, in County Antrim, is the anglicised version of Creamhchoill, or wild-garlic wood. All of life, whether sought after for food or fuel, grand or humble, is to be found in place names. In County Tyrone the townland of Pollnameeltogue means ‘hollow of the midges’, and Knockiniller is the ‘hill of the eagle’. A journey through the towns of Ireland is a glimpse into an abundant past natural history, where people named their homes in terms of the life around them.

Glenwherry has the quaintly named Whappstown Road. Whapp or whaup is an onomatopoeic Celtic name, reproducing the sound of one of the curlew’s barking calls. It also gives its name to Whaup Hill in County Antrim and Whaup Island in County Down. When an old musician from the Sperrin Mountains was asked to sing a song, he said, ‘I whaups a bit on the flute as well, ye know,’ and ‘What’s thou waap-whaupin aboot?’ was a rebuke to a crying child in the northeast of England.

Whappstown Road is a hint that curlews were once common here in Antrim. Maybe their calls over the hills as they returned to breed in early spring lifted the hearts of those past generations of tough farmers. Neal Warnock, the RSPB Conservation Advisor for Glenwherry, told me how much he looked forward to their arrival in March. ‘For me, being up in the hills all year round, there’s quite a few months when you’re faced with silence, and the more I work up here the more the anticipation grows of hearing the first curlew of the spring return. It’s fantastic to hear them call across the valley and the farmers look forward to them coming back, too. They hold an important place in the hearts and minds of the people that live in this area.’

It seems they always have. In the late nineteenth century, James McKowen, a worker in a bleach factory near Belfast, led a double life as a poet and songwriter. He used the pen name ‘Curlew’, or sometimes ‘Kitty Connor’, and wrote lyrics for ballads. Though his hands helped turn the wheels of industry, his heart was alone on the bogs with curlews in spring. His collection of poems appeared in The Harp of Erin, in 1869, and his song ‘The Curlew’ relives his boyhood joy of wandering through the glens of Antrim, listening to that soulful cry of the wilderness, alongside those of the golden eagle and the turtle dove.

The Curlew

By the marge of the sea has thy foot ever strayed,

When eve shed its deep mellow tinge?

Hast thou lingered to hear the sweet music that’s made

By the ocean-waves’ whispering fringe?

Tis then you may hear the wild barnacle’s call

The scream of the sea-coving mew,

And that deep thrilling note that is wilder than all

The voice of the wailing curlew.

The song of the linnet is sweet from the spray

The blackbird’s comes rich from the thorn;

And clear is the lark’s when he’s soaring away

To herald the birth of the morn.

The note of the eagle is piercing and loud,

The turtle’s, as soft as it’s true;

But give me, oh! give me, that song from the cloud

The voice of the wailing curlew.

Sky minstrel! How often I’ve paused as a child,

As I’ve roamed in my own native vale,

To listen thy music so fitful and wild,

Born far on the wings of a gale.

And still, as I rest by the door of my cot,

Thy voice can youth’s feelings renew;

And strangely I’m tempted to envy thy lot,

Thou wild-noted, wailing curlew.4

Glenwherry is an anglicised version of the original Irish name Gleannfaire, translated as ‘valley of the watching’. The original reason for this name is lost in time, but it is apt once again thanks to the RSPB project based here to closely observe the area’s breeding curlews as part of its Curlew Recovery Programme, led by Sarah Sanders. They recorded forty-four pairs in 2016, and by today’s standards that makes Glenwherry a hotspot for curlews in Northern Ireland.

A key part of the Curlew Recovery Programme is the snappily named Trial Management Project (TMP). Despite the corporate terminology, the TMP is a practical, five-year project concentrating on six upland areas (of which Glenwherry is one) spread throughout northern England, Scotland, North Wales and Northern Ireland. Each site consists of two roughly 10 square-kilometre plots situated close to each other. One plot will see all the action – habitat management, predator control, special grazing regimes and so on – whereas on the other site it will be business as usual with no special measures. In the active site, in Glenwherry, the RSPB is working with farmers to thin out rushes and create better feeding and nesting areas by targeted grazing of cattle. Some shrubs and trees are also being removed so that predators such as hooded crows can’t use them as lookout posts to spot eggs and chicks. Foxes and crows will also be controlled in the active plot, but not in the control site. At the end of the five-year period, hopefully, a clearer idea will have emerged about what kind of management is needed to stabilise or even reverse the decline of upland curlews.

When I visited Glenwherry in April 2016 it was only year two of the TMP, so too early for any results, but the project hasn’t come a day too soon. The last thirty years have been catastrophic for Northern Irish curlews, and many other farmland birds. Back in 1986 a survey found 5,000 pairs of breeding curlews throughout the province. By 2015 their numbers had crashed to fewer than 500 pairs, and probably closer to 250. That is a decline of over 90 per cent. The cause? Changes in farming. Agriculture dominates Northern Ireland, three-quarters of the land is farmed. It is the country of toil and soil. Prior to the 1970s, small mixed farms, with both arable farming and livestock, were widespread. They were family-run affairs that were, to use the jargon, ‘extensive’ in character. Extensive (as opposed to ‘intensive’) means low chemical input in terms of fertiliser and pesticides, low stocking density and lower yield per acre. A seven-year rotation system was used for crops such as oats, potatoes, and pasture for hay. Over the decades that followed, these smaller farms have been amalgamated into larger, specialised, intensive businesses, centred mainly on livestock. There are now 1.7 million cows in Northern Ireland providing both milk and meat, compared to a million in 1965, and over the same time frame land given over to crops declined by two-thirds. Fields that once grew food for people are now laid to grass for livestock.

In 1965 cows were fed through the winter months on hay, 90 per cent of which was cut in August. By 1995 hay was replaced by silage – a method of growing food for cows by frequently cutting grass and storing it anaerobically under large sheets of black plastic. If they can produce enough grass, farmers can now feed cows throughout the year. Soil is ‘enhanced’ by the addition of fertiliser and the grass is sprayed with pesticides. By using super-productive varieties such as rye grass, larger quantities can be grown and then cut as often as every three weeks from April onwards and stored in silos. The dairy sector is particualry important. In 1965 there were 196,000 dairy cows in Northern Ireland; today, 312,000 cows produce milk and cheese, two-thirds of which is exported. The dairy industry is vital to the economy of Northern Ireland – and it depends on silage.

Patrick G. McBride was a farmer in the Glens of Antrim for much of the twentieth century. His memoir, Where the Curlew Flies, describes the old ways of doing things. He celebrates the daily joys of working on the land, as well as being realistic about the hard labour of farming with hand tools and horses. Hay was made with rakes and forks, and ‘meadow hay’ on wet ground was always cut with a scythe. In his lifetime, slow-paced, hands-on farming was replaced by fast-paced machines that could harvest multiple cuts every year. He experienced directly the seismic shift in agriculture. Reflecting upon it, he concludes, ‘I think that no other generation will ever see as many changes in farming as my generation has lived through.’

Agriculture dominates Northern Ireland. Farms have been passed down through generations and land is integral to Irish identity. When farming was extensive, it was good for curlews and lots of other wildlife. When it changed from manual to mechanised, organic to chemical, hay to silage, it spelled disaster. Ground-nesting birds such as the corncrake and curlew were eradicated in large areas. Farming machinery destroys eggs and chicks indiscriminately. Faced with danger, curlew chicks will sink down into the grass and freeze, where they are killed instantly by the rotating blades. Nests full of eggs are flattened. Those birds that do manage to survive the machines will often fall prey to foxes and crows, two species that do well in intensive farmland.

The border county of Tyrone was once a curlew stronghold. Like County Antrim, this too was a land of rugged bogs and farms, but it underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1980s. Many of the peat bogs were stripped for turf and the floodplains of rivers such as the Blackwater were drained. The River Blackwater itself was dredged, deepened and widened, removing valuable wetland habitat for all kinds of wildlife. Some of the more marginal farmland was abandoned. Because curlews were once so numerous there, the RSPB set up a curlew recovery project, but sometime in the early 2000s they disappeared from the landscape and the project was abandoned. It took less than a generation to see curlews eradicated from a large area where they used to be common. Snipe, lapwing and redshank have all but gone, too. It was a stark example of how quickly birds can vanish. Now the only places that are safe for waders are where agriculture remains extensive or protected as nature reserves, such as cold, wet, upland Glenwherry and the islands in the middle of Lough Erne, County Fermanagh. The rest of Northern Ireland is now curlew-free. But even Glenwherry, which largely escaped the intensification of the lowlands, is under threat.

Neal and I sit in the car for a while in a layby to let the worst of a squall pass. Through the misting windows he points out the patchwork appearance of the view in front of us. Sections of bog are being turned into bright green rye grass fields or planted with conifers, both activities encouraged by subsidies. ‘We need to help farmers to keep some areas rough and unimproved for the curlews,’ he says. Keeping forestry at bay on land that is deemed unproductive in terms of farming is a big challenge. The Northern Ireland government has a target to increase tree cover by 50 per cent by 2056. Curlews, like many other ground-nesting birds, avoid nesting within 500 metres of the edge of forest, nervous of predators like foxes, badgers and crows. Far more land is therefore taken out of nesting habitat than just the area that is planted. Wind and solar farm applications are now commonplace in marginal land, bringing their own dangers for flying birds and disturbance on the ground. Glenwherry is currently considering proposals for a 250-acre solar farm, and wind farms can be seen all around the area. Slowly the upland bog is being transformed into a tamed, multi-use landscape. Somehow, in all of this complexity of human needs and endeavour, curlews must try to survive in their dwindling niche.

As the sleet tests the mettle of my new waterproof jacket, Neal and I wander along a puddle-strewn track between fields in the active Trial Management Project area, hoping to see a pair of curlews that had been spotted nearby. They have not long arrived back for the breeding season and their behaviour suggests they are staking out their territory and strengthening their pair bond, prior to laying eggs. Kerry Darbishire describes early-arriving curlews in her poem, ‘Messengers of Spring’:

In pairs they returned

from winter marsh like ghosts

to sink their new moon beaks

deep into turf soft as rain.

Mike Smart, an ornithologist friend who monitors curlews throughout the year in the west of England, describes their typical courtship behaviour when they first arrive on their territory:

They seem to adopt very characteristic behaviour; they are generally in twos, stalking round in a rather proprietorial sort of way, a little way apart, feeding quietly, and not getting very close together. Sometimes, however, they move quite close and start courtship display, in a moderate way, running around quite quickly together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes one ahead of the other, often picking up bits of grass or vegetation as they go, and throwing it down again; this can last for ten minutes. Occasionally, the male opens his wings slightly and does a couple of flaps, and seems to hold his tail up, rather like a Snipe. Sometimes the male displays by swooping and calling to a female on the ground and then they carry on feeding together in the surrounding grasslands.

Under normal circumstances, there would be many pairs of curlews with males sometimes fighting each other to define the edges of their territory. In March and April, uplands like Glenwherry should come alive with the sounds of calling curlews. In his book, Waders, their Breeding, Haunts and Watchers, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson describes how, ‘On a still morning, the moor soon rings with the marvellous bubbling songs and the air dances of different cocks.’5 Males and females would dance and sing to each other, chasing around and seeing off intruders from dawn to dusk. Angry males would rip up grass and throw it about, displaying their white undersides, psychologically bullying any male that tried to muscle in. Sometimes clashes would involve exchanging blows with their wings, but rarely with their delicate and easily damaged bills. Eventually, hierarchy and territories would be established, and nests would be built at least 100 metres apart, often more. The birds would be spread over the landscape, the best areas taken by the dominant pairs. But there is no such vying for territory today, and these cannot be described as normal circumstances. Neal and I have to search for quite a while to find even a single pair. The air is not full of wonderful bubbling and trilling; it is largely silent.

I envy Neal his wellies in this waterlogged world. ‘Stick your boots in the turf of this island and they fill up with the bog water,’ wrote blogger Alen McFadzean about walking the hills of Antrim. Maybe he had been along this footpath, too. Suddenly, out of the silence, comes a fluty call – half mournful, half laughing. In the distance, a curlew and its mate fly low and land further away from us. They had spied us and we had spooked them. I am amazed we can provoke this reaction from such a distance, but curlews are always nervous, and in this seemingly empty landscape we stand out. But this is proof they have made it back again, this pair and a few others we hear over the course of the morning, pouring intermittent music over a bleak, frozen moor. Ted Hughes heard curlews on a winter’s morning, carving sound out of frosty air. ‘I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge/The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.’6

No one knows for sure if curlews re-pair with the same partner each year, but it’s generally believed that they do. Through binoculars, I can just make them out as they land in rushes and creep away like soldiers in combat. Brown birds in a brown field – a tantalising glimpse of life that melts into the bog all too soon. Northern Ireland seems to be full of things half-seen. Religion and myth intertwine here. The ghosts of ancient kings, fairies and giants hang like mists over the land, and the remnants of the havoc they caused by their battles and magical spells are the boulders, loughs, depressions, cliffs and mountains. That potent symbol of Ulster, the Red Hand, is founded on a boat race over the sea where mythical kings raced each other to the shore. Whoever touched the land first could proclaim ownership. One king was so desperate to win he cut off his own hand and threw it onto the beach, declaring his sovereignty with blood.

It seems almost every feature of the landscape tells a fantastical tale of good and evil or love and hate. Large glacial boulders are the stones thrown by petulant giants. The Giant’s Causeway – that astonishing area of black, columnar basalt on the Antrim coast – is supposedly the remnant of a walkway built by a giant called Finn McCool. He made it so that he could walk over the sea to fight his enormous Scottish enemy, the giant Benandonner. After some trickery and deception, the Scottish giant ran away and Finn tore up a clod of earth to hurl after him. The hole left behind filled with water to form Lough Neagh (the largest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland, just to the southwest of Glenwherry). The lump of earth that landed in the sea is said to be the Isle of Man. Finn then destroyed the causeway. The ragged remnants are now a World Heritage Site, attracting tourists from all over the world, keen to learn more about the bad behaviour of these ill-tempered ancients. Ireland was the stage for wild gods to act upon, or, as Austin Clarke in his novel The Singing Men at Cashel wrote, ‘There was no hill or wood in all the land which has not been remembered in poetry. Had not those great teachers of the past taught that matter was as holy as the mind, that hill and wood were an external manifestation of immortal regions?’7

Wherever you look in Celtic Britain there are stories like these; folk tales that have been told and retold. Jeremy Mynott, author, classicist and naturalist distils perfectly how these stories take on a modern resonance. ‘These are myths that have become snowballs, gathering size and picking up bits and pieces from other folklores as they roll through the ages. No one can stop them to construct them more neatly or make them internally consistent, as we would scientific theories. But they also flare brightly in our imaginations, like a comet streaking across the sky in a blaze, trailing its comet’s tail of vaguer associations, memories and intimations.’ Perhaps their real value is in connecting us to what W.B. Yeats called the ‘brooding memory and dangerous hope’8 of our ancestors. And behind all this intensity, the once-common call of the curlew provided the mood music for these flights of imagination.

As we walk back to the car, leaving the curlews to their moorland peace, the looming form of Slemish Mountain is emerging from under a blanket of cloud. This vast monument to Christian fortitude is another place shrouded in half-truths and legends. It was supposedly the site of the enslavement of Ireland’s most famous saint. St Patrick was himself a figure of misconception and contradiction. This most Irish of saints was probably born in Wales and has never been canonised by a pope, but he became a saint by popular acclaim. One famous story tells us how Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland – not that there have ever been any snakes on the island. It is most likely a metaphor for eradicating paganism.

St Patrick lived in the fifth century, when Christianity was taking hold of Europe but paganism was still widespread in the West. Paganism, a complex and varied system of beliefs based on the worship of many gods, is deeply related to the natural world. The veil that divides the spiritual realm from nature and humanity is thin and insubstantial. In ancient Ireland, the gods were feisty and flighty, as quick to rage as to bestow blessings, making the natural world an unpredictable place. Nature took on dual characteristics. The eagle was the earthly embodiment of kingship and power, the swan represented the spirits of love and purity. The owl was linked to the shadowy goddess of moonlight and mourning, and Morrigan, the goddess of battle, took the form of the crow. The curlew, with its haunting cry, was associated with the mysterious god Dalua, who calls people to ponder their place on Earth amidst the beauty of lonely places. The cry that embodies both sorrow and grief gave voice to inexpressible fears. This meshing of gods, human beings and the Earth dominated the stories of ancient pagan Europe.

This was the world of St Patrick: two belief systems living uneasily side by side and often in conflict. Patrick was raised in a Christian household. When he was a teenager it is thought he was kidnapped by Irish slave traders and forced to work as a shepherd for the pagan chief, Milchu, in what is now County Antrim. On the windswept and rain-soaked Slemish Mountain, he increasingly turned to the faith of his father. After six years he escaped back to his homeland and trained to be a priest. Thirty years later he returned to Ireland to convert his captors. Some believe St Patrick used the famous Celtic cross as a means to connect with the pagan inhabitants of Ireland. The traditional crucifix with the circle of life binding the arms is the iconic symbol of Celtic Christianity, combining the Christian meaning of the crucifix with the pagan symbolism of the life-giving sun. Paganism, with its stress on the sacredness of life, lived on in a new form in this early Christian era.

Some legends about St Patrick echo the strong pagan relationship between the spiritual and natural worlds. One Irish folktale has Patrick trying to cross the sea to the Isle of Man, but a dense mist prevented him seeing the shore. He was in mortal danger until the clear call of a curlew directed him towards land, and hence to safety. He was grateful and blessed the curlew, decreeing that these birds should be protected from harm and that their nests must always be difficult to find. Celtic Irish folktales also have curlews warning Jesus of the approach of enemies, either by calling loudly to wake him from sleep, or by covering over his footprints in the sand. These tales intricately bind curlews (and many other creatures) to God and human salvation. Nature is seen as an active player in the Christian story, where selfless acts of sacrifice and compassion are freely given.

St Patrick’s captivity on Slemish Mountain is a treasured story in Northern Ireland, and on his feast day, 17 March, large crowds make a pilgrimage to the summit. On the same day, say local farmers, curlews return to breed, and from the break of dawn their calls ring from the hillsides. St Patrick would have heard them, heralding warmer days and the prospect of new life, as he prayed in the cold solitude of the mountain. The curlew and St Patrick are intertwined in the minds and hearts of generations of farmers in Antrim. To lose the last remaining curlews from this land would be to lose a part of the soul of Northern Ireland.

Neal and I retreat to a farm owned by Sam and Wilma Bonnar, a family who have farmed Glenwherry for generations. They are friendly, hard-working people and their warm and comfortable farmhouse is a thoroughly modern bungalow, like many rural buildings in Ireland today. A large picture window looks out over the fields and distant bog, giving an airy feel in an open landscape. On a clear day I am sure you can see for miles. As it is, I can barely make out the field right next to the house where a lone lapwing calls plaintively to unseen companions. It’s a sad sound, as rain beats against the panes. We chat about the weather and the hardships of farming through the winter, while their two-year-old grandson runs around the room. There is a real sense that this is a family that is deeply rooted in the land and values the wildlife they host. They work with the RSPB to keep the Trial Management Project on target, and without them, and other like-minded volunteers, Neal’s job would be nigh impossible. Apart from helping with the physical work of management, Sam knows what’s around, telling Neal where he has seen birds and whether numbers are up or down compared to previous years. I ask about the subsidies available for combining farming with wildlife conservation; is enough money being made available? Sam’s answer is a first warning shot across the bow, and I will hear many like it over the coming weeks. Wildlife is good to have, but it has to pay its way. Without help from agri-environment schemes, farmers wouldn’t be able to prioritise curlews, lapwings, or anything else that requires taking land out of intensive production. There is too much pressure to increase yields and too many costs to meet. Curlews are not seen as a pest species, they are not unwelcome, but their needs cannot be met without financial help. In other words, wildlife has to pay rent on land that is no longer theirs.

It is time to move on; the official start date of the walk is just days away. I leave Antrim and head east towards Enniskillen as the sun breaks through the clouds. The land softens as mountains give way to low-lying green meadows and the watery basin of the River Erne in County Fermanagh. There is already much to think about.

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