As the results of the 2024 Eurasian Curlew breeding season come in, it looks like another mixed year. The poor weather in May and June seems to have had a serious effect in some places but helped in others. Generally, though, the trend is still downwards. But we mustn’t be too disheartened. Curlews are long-lived birds, and it will take a few years for some of the interventions to take effect. This is where we are, and a plea for us all to work together to save them.
Over eight years ago, in February 2016, I stood by an estuary and watched a lone Curlew feeding in the mud. It was winter and a peevish wind blew in from the sea. Through binoculars I could see its wind-ruffled feathers and how intensely it searched for food. As it stepped between land and sea it scanned the surface of the mud for hints of life, clues that are hidden from human senses. Perhaps a slight vibration or the tiniest bubbling, who knows, but it is enough for a Curlew to know where to insert its weapon. Curlews read mud with precision. Back then, I wasn’t a good enough Curlew watcher to take a guess at its sex, it was simply a beautiful, grey-brown bird in grey-brown mud against grey-brown sea. I loved everything about it.
I knew Curlews were declining, but I didn’t understand the drivers. I was only generally aware of issues around land use and predation, and the nuance of those was yet to be discovered. But I did appreciate how they enhance a winter seascape. In the darkest days of the year Curlews bring an aching grace to a windswept mudflat, captured in their long-bill, long-legs and a rounded form and, of course, in their astonishing musicality.
I clearly remember how watching this bird made me feel, a mixture of admiration, appreciation, curiosity and deep affection. Admiration at its ability to withstand the cold and to navigate the terrain, appreciation of its artistic form, especially its elongated, arcuate bill and dancer’s legs, and curiosity about its life. What was it like, I wondered, to be a bird of ancient instincts in the modern world? Sea and mud are as old as time, and Curlews have evolved to use these liminal, shifting spaces with an easy elegance. If I screened out the houses and roads I could have been viewing a pre-historic scene. The affection I feel for them is harder to explain, they just do it for me. Everything that is Curlew speaks to all that is Mary Colwell, and I feel now as I did then, grateful and humbled that we share this fragment of time and space on Planet Earth.
And then, the air was rent by its call, a long, harsh curlee, curlee as it took off and flew to distant shores. The winter call of the curlew is as pared-down and pure as ice, and each time I hear it firing across a landscape it takes my breath away. The thought that such a call could fade into silence is more than I can bear.
My visit to an estuary in 2016 was prompted by a growing awareness of how badly Curlews are faring. A paper (above) in British Birds in December 2015 described them as the most pressing conservation priority for birds in the UK.
From my time as a producer in the BBC Natural History Unit, I knew that in some places, Ireland for example, the decline was a catastrophic 98% in 30 years, from over 5000 pairs in the 1980s to fewer than 150. There has been an 80% decline in Wales, 60% in Scotland and nearly 50% in England.
Seeing that single Curlew on a cold afternoon concentrated my concerns and it was a turning point. I knew that I had to do all I could to help them. I didn’t know what meant, exactly, or even if it was possible for one individual to do anything meaningful, but I had no doubt that I would try. That Curlew moment set in motion a train of events that has taken me to today.
Just two months after that Curlew encounter in April 2016, I undertook a 500-mile walk across Ireland, Wales and England to find out for myself what was happening to them. I began in the West of Ireland and arrived nearly 7 weeks later on the Wash in East Anglia. My book, Curlew Moon, is a record of that journey. By November, along with Irish conservationists, we had organised the first all-Ireland Curlew symposium in Higginstown, a unique gathering of stakeholders from conservation, farming and the extractive industries. A social science paper based on the meeting was published in 2020 in the Journal, Conservation and Science Practice.
The meeting also launched the Curlew Conservation Programme, which is now working across Ireland to protect the remaining few pairs, and this year is in receipt of major EU Life funding. The English Curlew meeting was held in WWT Slimbridge in February 2017, from which the Curlew Forum emerged as a loose coalition of lowland Curlew projects that meet each November to discuss the results of the breeding season and next steps. The Welsh meeting was in January 2018 and the multi-partner Curlew Wales was the result. The Scottish conference in Sept 2018 strengthened the status of Curlews in the Nature Scot initiative, Working for Waders. The Curlew conferences produced results.
Other things happened, too. The number of projects, both practical and academic grew exponentially and have added immeasurably to our understanding of the lives of Curlews and the threats they face; that work continues to expand. Headstarting has been added to the mix of measures, a crisis conservation tool that takes eggs from the wild, raises them in captivity and releases the birds at the point of fledging. It is a rapidly expanding technique that would have been unthinkable on this scale in 2016.
I launched World Curlew Day in 2018, and then a meeting in 10 Downing St with politicians and policy makers. King Charles held two Curlew symposia of his own, which resulted in the Curlew Recovery Partnership England being established, of which I am the chair. That same year, 2020, I launched my charity Curlew Action. I can’t think of another species that can claim as much love and activity over such a short time. As someone said to me recently, Curlews have become one of the most talked about birds in Britain.
So, are we winning the battle to save them? That is not easy to answer and is beyond the scope of this article. In many ways it is too early to tell, and we may not see the result of many of the initiatives for another few years. There is nothing simple about finding solutions for a widespread bird that utilises a variety of habitats, many of them human generated such as farmland and grouse moors. Thorny issues such as predator control and silage cutting remain largely unresolved. Predator control continues to divide opinion. There is no doubt it is needed to save Curlews, that much is agreed, but how intense it should be, over what scale and who should do it – none of that is simple. Silage production is intrinsically tied to food production, something we all worry about in an increasingly unstable world. Agricultural activities directly affect ground-nesting birds producing tension between wildlife and food. Anyone who thinks Curlew conservation is simple is badly mistaken. There is no single solution, and it will take buy-in and cooperation from across society. But what I do know is, there is a real desire to make it work.
Watching Curlews today is a different experience than eight years ago. There is still admiration, appreciation, curiosity and affection, but now, I can add anxiety and frustration to the mix. Anxiety is rooted in the huge issues they face, which seem insurmountable, everything from intensive farming to climate change to loss of habitat. Finding solutions and implementing them is made more difficult because, as a society we are less aware of nature than at any other time in human history. The frustration lies in the politics of conservation. The divisions are still deep between organisations who truly care about the future of our native species, but who differ in how to do that. We seem incapable of setting aside suspicion, sometimes cynicism, and putting down swords. In many exchanges, articles and talks the language used is ugly and the tone unpleasant and sometimes insulting. But as we argue more birds slip away and the crisis deepens. It makes Curlew conservation as much about people as the birds themselves.
If we can’t save Curlews it bodes ill for other endangered but less charismatic species, especially those that we don’t find useful. Wildlife that has no economic value struggles in a profit driven world, but it is a measure of who we are if we decide (and it is a decision) to save them. Protecting the vulnerable is the mark of greatness. I’ll leave on a quote by Henry Ford, “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is a process; working together is success.”