Curlew Moon

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

Chapter 4

THE LAND OF LAKES (#ulink_002ca5ab-b6bd-5bcb-9b94-8503b2c9cd9a)

Sunlight on water is always beautiful; when sparkling ripples spread into the distance, the air shimmers with dancing sunbeams. My sister Sarah and I stand on the shore of Lower Lough Erne, 300 square miles of freshwater, waving reeds and tranquillity. We place a lock of my mother’s hair onto the surface and hold hands, watching as this little piece of her is carried off on the waves. Enniskillen, built on an island between Upper and Lower Lough Erne, was her home town. Dementia took her a year ago to this day. Even though the disease systematically destroyed her faculties, right up until the end she would smile at the mention of Fermanagh and Lough Erne.

Our family home was in Stoke-on Trent, as unlike County Fermanagh as you can get, and one of the things my mother and her family often reminisced about was the sound of summer fields, with vocals provided by corncrakes. Their grating croaks filled the warm night air from April until September. They are consummate callers; one bird can deliver 20,000 rasps a night, which can be heard a mile away. Their Latin name, Crex crex, gives a good idea of the sound; a piece of hard plastic scraping a cheese grater. The mythical poet, warrior and seer of ancient Ireland, Finn, called corncrakes ‘strenuous bards’.