Curlew Moon

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#u4c49e06d-d61f-532b-9a67-db1c37dc830f)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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