Curlew Moon

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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.