Curlew Moon

In the early twentieth century there were tens of thousands of corncrakes breeding throughout Britain and Ireland, flying in from southern Africa in the early spring. The lush fields shaped by traditional agriculture provided them with perfect habitat for nesting. Their numbers were legion, but that alone is no guarantee of safety. The swift changes in farming practices and the switch to silage wiped them out in a generation. By 1994 not a single corncrake was recorded breeding in Northern Ireland. They simply disappeared from a landscape where they had been a part of agricultural life for centuries. Occasionally a solo male will still arrive and emit a lonely call from a field in Tyrone or on Rathlin Island, hoping to attract a mate, but so far his song has gone unheeded. Today their rarity has turned them into celebrities. If one is heard calling, crowds gather alongside TV, radio and newspaper reporters. So keen are people to hear that wheeze once more and reconnect with the sound of their yesterdays, they are willing to travel from miles around. Many listen in tears.

Northern Ireland is not alone in losing corncrakes. The early nineteenth-century English poet John Clare was familiar with the feathered croaker as he laboured in the fields of Northamptonshire. Back then, they were literally everywhere in the spring and summer months, but it was almost impossible to find them – they could disappear without a trace, all the while still calling loudly. Corncrakes are accomplished ventriloquists, throwing their croaks around the meadow. Just when you think you’ve got one cornered, it is sneakily creeping through the grass on the other side of the field. A trick John Clare was familiar with:

And yet tis heard in every vale

An undiscovered song

And makes a pleasant wonder tale

For all the summer long.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

Yet by the middle of the twentieth century the corncrake had gone from England and Wales as well as most of Scotland. Today it still breeds in the Western Isles, where concerted conservation efforts over many years have restored their numbers to around 1,000 calling males. Could there be a starker example of how we can eradicate wildlife from our lives? Corncrakes were once a widespread breeding bird in the UK, and now they are barely a memory. What happened to the corncrake is happening to the curlew throughout much of its range, which makes conservation projects like the one on the islands of Lough Erne all the more important.

Lough Erne is one of the largest lakes in the UK. It is divided into Upper and Lower Lough Erne, separated by a pinch point upon which sits the city of Enniskillen. There are around 154 islands dotted throughout these great lakes. As with so many places in Ireland, Lough Erne abounds in myth. According to legend, it was named after Erne, a Lady in Waiting to the warrior Queen Meabh, who fled from a fearsome monster emerging from a cave. She was drowned in the lough, and as her body dissolved in the water she infused it with life-giving powers that nourish the surrounding land. There is often a moral to these tales of tragedy: where life springs from death, and fear and destruction make way for renewal.

Northern Ireland saw more than its fair share of destruction in the closing thirty years of the twentieth century. In a war between two sides defined largely by their Christian denomination – Protestant or Catholic – the violence had little to do with doctrine and everything to do with social justice and the distribution of power. The Troubles tore Northern Ireland apart; 3,600 people lost their lives and thousands more were injured. In 1987 Enniskillen saw one of the worst attacks. Twelve people died and sixty-three were injured when a bomb exploded in the city on Remembrance Sunday. I spoke to my mother on the phone that day and remember hearing the despair in her voice for a country where there seemed to be so much religion and so little Christianity.

Those years of misery not only blighted lives but also took their toll on the economy of the North. ‘There is a sense of wanting to catch up after the decades of low investment during The Troubles,’ says Brad Robson, the RSPB’s Conservation Manager for County Fermanagh. ‘Conservation isn’t really a priority. It’s not that people don’t care about nature, the land is in their blood, but they want the country to make up for lost years.’ Since the end of The Troubles, Northern Ireland’s economy has grown at twice the rate of the rest of the UK. In the midst of all this rebuilding, the loss of breeding waders might have been considered as little more than collateral damage.

There are forty-three islands in the RSPB reserve on Lower Lough Erne. Twelve of them are managed for breeding waders, intensively so for the last few years. There have been successes, not just for curlews but for other species like redshank, too. An auspicious place, I think, to begin a walk for curlews. The day before I begin, I meet Brad at dawn in a layby on the side of the road that follows the western edge of Lower Lough Erne. Paddles in hand, we walk down through the trees that fringe the shore to a hidden Canadian canoe and push off into cold, calm, grey water.

Islands, particularly uninhabited ones, always hold an air of mystery. Gazing at them from afar, they tantalise the imagination. Landing on their shores is an exciting step into a different world, even though the one we are headed for is very well trodden by conservationists. As we paddle towards Muckinish Island the rhythmic splashing of the oars adds to the sense of early morning peace. I experience pangs of grief at the thought of my mother’s hair floating somewhere on the surface. There are no cars on the roads, no planes overhead, just the lapping of water and a cold breeze. I am half hoping to catch a glimpse of the fabled Lady of the Lake; a beautiful woman dressed in white, who, so the story goes, walks from island to island carrying garlands of wildflowers. She is said to step lightly over the surface of the water, barely visible through the morning mists. To see her, so they say, is an omen for good times ahead. But there is no drifting mist or floaty lady scattering blooms, just an increasing amount of noise as we get closer to the island.

The honking of Canada geese can really get under your skin. In the still morning air they sound like an unruly orchestra of home-made instruments. There are other calls, too, if you could but hear them through the geese. The lovely whistle of sandpipers occasionally cuts through, as does the urgent, panicky piping of the redshank, the sentry of these watery worlds. And then, as our canoe moves closer, the thrilling sound of two curlews calling and bubbling above us, slicing through the anserine cacophony. They are flying high and scythe through the air above the leafless trees that fringe the island, before swooping low and disappearing behind the canopy.

Muckinish Island is small. We walk around it in twenty minutes, accompanied by the sounds of indignant Canada geese strutting around their huge nests. Brad gets a text message to say a curlew has been found dead at another location, probably the victim of a peregrine attack. The air reeks of guano and the ground is rough underfoot. To me, this island seems overworked; it has the feel of a place that has had a lot expected of it for many years. Generations of farmers brought their sheep and cows here to graze, crops were grown in small fields, and now it is a carefully managed bird reserve. Most of the trees and scrub have been recently cleared, leaving mossy stumps, easily tripped over. It’s had invasions, too. A few years ago, some badgers managed to swim the 250 metres that separates Muckinish from the mainland. They established a sett and swiftly set about eating the eggs and chicks of nesting waders. A shiny electric fence now stretches across one side, separating remnant woodland where the badgers live from wader habitat. It is obvious how much effort has gone into just this one island, and there are many more to work on.

We see five curlews in all on Muckinish, displaying and calling. They have flown in from farms on the mainland where they have been feeding and roosting overnight. The softer soils of the mainland have worms and insects that can be extracted more easily than tackling the thin shingle covering the islands. But the birds can’t nest on the farms. Danger lies in every direction; too many grass-cutting machines, trampling hooves, people with dogs and hungry predators. We survey the fertilised, emerald grassy squares from the rough shoreline of the island. Sheep graze peacefully. ‘It shows how important a mixed countryside is,’ says Brad. ‘Curlews don’t just need safe nesting areas in long grass, they have to be able to feed in shorter vegetation when they have chicks. And in the winter, they go to the coast and mudflats. To protect curlews we have to think big.’ The curlew is a bird that spreads its wings. It flies over the whole country. It needs land that is wet and dry, green and brown, long grass and short, mud and marsh, high ground and lowland. Curlews live in the whole landscape, not just in one place. It is a bird that binds together many different places, and to look after them we must consider everywhere from the coast to the mountains. The work under way on the islands of Lough Erne is just one piece of a very large jigsaw.

When Brad arrived to take up the job in 1997, waders of all species were declining rapidly. In 1998 the area that is now the reserve had sixty pairs of curlews. By 2009 that had declined further to thirty-four pairs. Even those that did breed only occasionally managed to fledge chicks. In the worst case, on one large island, fledglings survived in only two out of fourteen years. ‘Curlews were in a really desperate situation,’ says Brad. ‘Like corncrakes, they did very well in hay meadows that were cut late, it gave the birds a chance to raise their young before the grass was cut. Given the changing weather we have these days, it isn’t a surprise people cut for silage as often as they can, but early cutting isn’t compatible with ground-nesting birds.’ The silage machines did for the curlews in the mainland fields, but even on the islands, where they should have been safe, numbers continued to fall. Many of the islands had been farmed for generations, but things were changing. In some places farming had been all but abandoned and the land scrubbed over. Water levels of the lake were artificially varied, affecting the foreshore where many birds nested. Forests were planted, providing perfect lookouts for predators like hooded crows. Foxes are good swimmers and increasing numbers on the mainland meant they were becoming more of a problem offshore. Slowly but surely even these island havens of tranquillity were becoming less suitable for ground-nesting birds.

From the late 1990s onwards, small-scale targeted management on the RSPB reserve started to turn things around. Continued removal of trees, scrub and predators and improved grazing management meant that by 2014 the curlew population had increased to forty-seven pairs. Two-thirds of their nests hatched young. And it was not just the curlew that benefited; all of the wader populations responded. From the low point of 104 pairs of waders in 2000, there was an increase to 219 pairs in 2014. ‘We have demonstrated that curlews will respond to management,’ says Brad. ‘The next step is to roll this out into the wider countryside.’ It is a big ask. Everything about the direction of travel is away from making land wildlife-friendly and more towards using every inch of it to make money. Curlew, snipe, redshank, lapwing and oystercatchers are not money-spinners, and though they are well liked and part of our culture and heritage, they are not a priority.

None of this habitat management comes cheap. Electric fencing is expensive and keeping the island curlew-friendly requires strategic planning, physical work, and liaison and negotiation with local communities. Curlews not only have to pay their way on farmland through subsidies, they also have to rely on the donations received by charities to survive in nature reserves. You could say that curlews everywhere have to sing for their supper in a world where money rules. It seems there is no place for them just to be. The Antrim and Fermanagh new moon birds are lucky to have the spending power of the RSPB behind them.

We sit in the canoe and chat for a while about the future of Northern Ireland’s curlews. Antrim and Fermanagh hold well over 90 per cent of the Northern Ireland population. Both Brad Robson and Neal Warnock know that without the cooperation of farmers, and the general public giving to wildlife charities, it will be very difficult to reverse the downward trend seen throughout Europe, and most especially in Ireland. There is some hope to be derived from the fact that the people of the North are still closely connected to the land. There is a blurring of lines between town and country, with many people still having strong links to a farming way of life, either directly or through close relatives. And this is a small country where the rural and urban sit closely together; where farmers’ fields end by the garden fence.

Tapping into this public connection with the environment, and the Irish love of all things lyrical, in 2010 the RSPB asked the Northern Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney, to write the foreword to the conservation plan for Lough Beg, the place where he grew up in County Antrim. The un-poetically named Lough Beg Management Plan was thus given poetry through Heaney’s appeal to reconnect with what he called ‘the country of the mind’, the place where memory and feeling come to life through the past. The names and places highlighted in the Management Plan, he said:

‘… belong first and foremost in memory and imagination. They evoke a dream land that was once the real land, a shore at evening, quiet water, wind in the grass, the calls of birds, maybe a man or woman out in a back field just standing looking, counting cattle, listening. The Lough Beg Management Plan intends to make that country of the mind a reality once again. It wants to bring back a landscape where the peewit and the curlew and the whirring snipe are as common as they used to be on those 1940s evenings when I’d go with my father to check on our cattle on the strand.’2 (#litres_trial_promo)

This very human appeal to emotion and memory engages people on a different level to the language of science, strategy and directive. Inviting Heaney’s contribution was a stroke of genius. A ‘country of the mind’, beautifully drawn out in the poet’s gentle phrases, is a place we hold dear, where past landscapes energise our plans for the future. Perhaps all conservation literature should be written by poets, employing the power of meaningful words to galvanise the hearts and minds of a wide range of people. Mario Cuomo, the American Democratic politician, famously believed, ‘You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.’

In many ways, the span of Seamus Heaney’s life (1939–2013) captured the dramatic changes that engulfed Northern Ireland. His poetry in Death of a Naturalist conveys the quiet, rural simplicity of his childhood, when lighting was by gas lamps and turf was cut by hand. His final words, sent to his wife by text message just minutes before he died, were ‘Noli timere’, Latin for ‘do not be afraid’. Huge changes and an uncertain future were about to engulf his family, and from his mobile phone he used an ancient language and a phrase found frequently in the Bible to comfort them. He was born into a time when life was slow and rooted in the soil, he died when his beloved country was brightly lit and mechanised, with high-speed communications moving fast through the ether. Heaney embraced the old and the new, but he never lost his great love of the visceral, beautiful land of his childhood.

The night before I set off, 20 April, is clear. I stand outside my bed and breakfast and look up at the sky; a full moon hangs peacefully in the blackness. Is this a good omen? A full moon has ancient associations with lunacy, from the Latin luna, for moon. This silver disc was thought to exercise a powerful influence over our emotions, tugging them as it does the waters of the seas. Lunatics were thus at the mercy of the waxing and waning of the moon. Standing in the cool breeze on this calm, starry night, I can’t help but think that the task ahead is in many ways a lunatic scheme. The journey feels enormous, and nothing feels solid. I have never met most of the people I will be staying with; the only contact we have had so far has been on social media. Nor have I ever travelled down most of the roads I have marked out on my maps. In my mind they appear as insubstantial as threads of cotton, snaking their way towards an unknown horizon. Five hundred miles of twisting roads – a lunatic walk for a new moon bird.

The following morning dawns bright and sunny. The date of my departure has not been picked at random. I had a number of reasons for setting out on 21 April. From a biological point of view, I wanted to begin when the birds were just starting to nest. The main laying season for curlews in northern Europe begins around now; the walk will end when the first chicks are fledging. But there were other reasons; 21 April is the feast day of a little-known saint, who could well be the first recorded curlew conservationist.

St Beuno (pronounced Bayno) was a sixth-century Welsh abbot who lived in west Wales, on the Llyn Peninsula. He is best known for establishing Christianity throughout North Wales and for his inspiring preaching, travelling widely over land and sea. He was also a dab hand at bringing people back to life, especially if they had had their heads cut off. He famously replaced his chaste cousin St Winifred’s head, which was removed when she rejected an amorous suitor wielding an axe. There is another story about St Beuno, though, which makes me smile, as he had a special relationship with a curlew. Legend has it that one day he was sailing between Anglesey and the Llyn when he dropped his book of sermons into the water. Immediately a curlew flew down, picked up the book and took it to the shore to dry. In an ending to the story remarkably similar to the tale told about St Patrick, St Beuno was so grateful he blessed the bird and said it should always be protected. So maybe we have St Beuno to blame for the fact that a curlew’s scrape in the ground is infuriatingly hard to spot unless you happen almost to stand on it. You could say that St Beuno’s blessing has protected curlews for well over a thousand years, though. On his feast day in 2016 I reckoned the poor, beleaguered curlews could well do with a renewal of his benediction.

And last, but not least, it is also the birthday of my personal conservation hero, John Muir. Born in 1838 in Dunbar, in southeast Scotland, he was taken to America by his father to work on a frontier farm. After an early life of drudgery and severe Christianity, Muir went on to travel throughout America and eventually began the process of establishing National Parks from Alaska to the southern deserts, protecting wildlife and landscapes for generations to come. He is most closely associated with the awe-inspiring Yosemite Valley, nestled high in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, which Muir called the ‘Range of Light’. He loved the natural world with a passion that was impossible to contain. It flowed out from his heart and through his pen into articles and books that held America in thrall. He urged a money-hungry, landscape-ravaging nation to cherish their country and sincerely believed that the wildlife and magnificent landscapes of America were gifts for all of humanity and should be protected in perpetuity, as ‘places to pray in and play in.’ And he also deeply cherished the more humble life on Earth, the dowdy and the overlooked, he treasured an ant as much as a mountain. ‘As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing,’ wrote Muir. There can be no other choice, therefore, for day one of the Curlew Walk than 21 April.

In the early morning, I hear that the first curlew eggs have been found on the Lough Erne reserve. At a small family gathering in a leisure-centre car park in the middle of Enniskillen, we say our goodbyes, and I set off. It feels good to be on my way, a relief after so much planning. I have a mile-long walk along a busy highway before turning off to a quieter road to Swanlinbar, in the Republic. After just a short while my mobile rings. The caller asks if we can meet. Minutes later, Giles Knight arrives in a 4x4 with Ulster Wildlife Trust written on the side, pulling into a side street as lorries thunder past. Giles works on restoring wildflower meadows, 97 per cent of which have disappeared from Northern Ireland over the last fifty years. It was his father, Gordon Knight, who had inspired his love of wild places. ‘Without his influence I wouldn’t be doing this,’ Giles says. ‘He taught me to love wildlife.’ Gordon had died suddenly in 1999 and it is clear how much Giles still misses him. ‘He had a particular soft spot for curlews. He wrote a poem about them, and I’d like you to have it,’ says Giles, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket and handing it to me. ‘Perhaps it will bring you luck.’

I am so moved; it is a truly touching and memorable moment, and it proves once again that curlews have the power to inspire. Giles and his family had no idea about the poem until after Gordon’s death. It tells of the birds’ seasonal swings between estuaries and the hills, and it celebrates the fact that their wild lives are governed by different rules to the ones that humanity now chooses to obey.

For Whom the Curlews Call

Twice daily calls the tide