On World Curlew Day, Gwennie Fraser laments diminishing evidence of curlews in the Northumbrian uplands.
Photo: Simon Fraser
I am listening for them, but I am just not hearing them. The chiffchaffs are back, echoing around the garden with their sweet banter, pied wagtails are dipping along the fence line, and the deciduous woodland behind the house is swelling with a growing chorus of birdsong born of all this blazing light. The arrow of life is pointing firmly forwards. But it is not what I’m straining to hear.
From March 10th onwards, a date I have carefully noted over the years, the kitchen door is always left slightly ajar on a fine day, to catch the sound of the first curlews returning to nest on our fell. But this year, the skies remain silent. The equinox has been and gone, fine weather has arrived and the days are passing. The curlews are just not here.
The return to breed marks a definitive moment on these Northumbrian uplands. The air suddenly erupts with wild, evocative calling, piercing the skin of winter for good, and the sky fills with wheeling pairs, vocalising territory as they claim and protect nesting sites in the tussock. Seasonal shapeshifters, their haunting cries are a vote of confidence in the whole cycle of life turning towards renewal, carrying everything with them over the line into spring.
Curlews winter on the coast, feeding in groups on tidal mudflats, saltmarshes and nearby farmland. They migrate in spring and summer to breed in upland areas of heather moorland, rough pasture and wetland. The timing of their return is the outcome of an instinctive migration from shore to hill, faithful to territory, returning year after year to nest on the same site. Curlews can live as long as twenty to thirty years, so the birds that return to this fell have perhaps been breeding here almost as long as we have lived in our cottage further down the hill. We are bound together by place.
The sound of the first curlews always stops me dead in my tracks. They are blood-bubblers, bell-ringers of the heart, summoners of souls. The curlew’s cry is an elemental call of bone and bill. The sky is suddenly cracked open by their soaring and transcendent bundle of song, like the first rockets unleashed from a firework display. Piercing, whooping, cries — urgent, incisive and yet ethereal, then warbling loops of repetition — a series of peppering question marks, followed by afterthoughts trailing on the wind. Above all the layers of garden birdsong, it is this exquisite arc of sound that braids the light and movement of spring together, filling the sky with poignant exuberance and exquisite precision. It is both watershed and waterfall.
Time is suspended in these distilled moments of remembered joy. It is music scored in the heart, heard again. Their haunting call is also my landing place in spring, year by year marking the passage of time, rooting me ever more deeply in my sense of home. It is the song of belonging. Their cries, pumping up and out above the skyline bring all the gathered determination of renewed life, a trembling shower of beauty, exaltation and purpose. It pours through me like meltwater — so pure and clear.
In recent years however, their return has been tinged by feelings of relief. The curlew is one of our most rapidly declining bird species. It is now on the UK Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern and listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as globally “Near Threatened” on the European Red List. The numbers returning to our fell have become visibly and audibly fewer; the volume turned down, with noticeable gaps in the repertoire, and hearing them more sporadically. The calls have dwindled to occasional trajectories rather than the outpouring that comes from a grid of multiple flight paths. There are simply fewer of them coming back.
Our neighbouring hill farmer knows the areas of tussock where they nest like the back of his hand. He told me two years ago that he knew of only two nesting pairs. I was deeply shocked by this statistic, but it explained this gradual thinning of sound. His stark analysis was a painful dawning of truth that things were dramatically changing. The return of these beautiful wetland birds to our fell was no longer a given. Each spring the words “only two pairs” now reverberate in my mind with growing discomfort. How many will there be this year? Will they come back? Will we hear them? Are they delayed by a cold spring? What does it mean?
The UK hosts around a quarter of the world’s breeding population in spring and summer, so their nesting in the hollows and nooks of tussock above our home plays a significant part in the overall picture. The steep population decline nationally is not just due to an overall degradation, fragmentation and reduction of suitable breeding habitat. It is also driven by high levels of predation by an increasing abundance of predators such as crows and foxes.
Gaggles of crows and jackdaws have become more commonplace, and we see their black flags waving over the fields in bigger numbers. And then there is the weather. Our last winter was long, cold and attritional, and the ground remained saturated in early spring. It is part of the whole matrix of causes and conditions driving one species against another, resulting in loss.
The survival rate from hatching to fledging is therefore crucial. Curlews are ground-nesting birds and their clutch of greeny-blue eggs are laid in a nest known as a “scrape”. Even though up to four eggs may be laid, the survival to fledging is only at 50%, and in recent years, over 70% of European nests failed to hatch a single chick. The numbers game is critical. Although curlews are long-lived, not enough younger birds are reaching adulthood to replace them. We are losing the curlews because they are dying out.
I felt somehow that our fell, trembling with song, and with little comparative change in hill farming practices over the years, held out some security for our nesting population. I hoped that it still offered a viable place for them to return and rear their young amidst this growing background of gloom.
In the past two years, there has been an attempt by a local farmer to control the crow population. Walking over the fell I have passed a trap, a large cage like an aviary. It’s a grim business, seeing these sacrificial birds on death row. I wonder if any of this trapping has spared the skylarks, lapwings and curlews that weave the soundscape of spring.
The slide from two pairs of curlews to none has brought home to me the baseline possibility of another extinction. It’s as thin a line as that. I’m on edge, their calls wheeling in my imagination everywhere I go. Yet I am met with an eerie silence, a space that is not being filled. Like a bereavement, their absence only underlies a more intense longing for their presence.
This spring I have drawn comfort from social media posts by friends. One small clip from the moors above Allendale in the North Pennines shows a friend’s garden at dusk, with its stonewalls and spires of grasses and a warbling backdrop of curlew against a sunset sky, their cries like precious stars falling to earth. Another clip from the South Tyne shows a rising sward of green fields in front of a friend’s cottage reassuringly replete with the audible flaring of curlew traffic. I’m heartened to see that elsewhere in Northumberland, the birds may still be returning in reasonable numbers.
The reminders are everywhere. Each time I drive home, I pass a Northumberland National Park road sign, welcoming me into its boundaried heart. The curlew is the Park logo and symbol of its wild uplands, its image stamped on every signboard, stone marker, ranger’s van, and piece of correspondence. A few elegant lines depict its slender body, long legs, arrow-like wings folded in flight, and the curving arc of its nearly 15cm long bill. This simple piece of graphic design, drawn up by the father of a classmate many years ago, nails the curlew to the fabric of the Northumbrian landscape, this sparsely populated land of far horizons, with its hills and valleys and singing waters.
Curlew. Numenius arquata. The bird’s scientific name derives from the distinctive shape of it long, downward- curved bill. Numenius means “new moon” and arquata, “bow-like”. These iconic birds are our wild archers, stitching the air with their arrows of song. They are our story-tellers of saltwater, heather and hill. And now these upland fells are emptying of what has always defined them. I ask myself; how will we begin to reimagine this landscape when the curlew is gone?
In these prolonged days of fine weather, I have tried to put the curlews out of my mind. It’s nearly April and the driest spell of fine weather since the unforgettable pandemic lockdown in spring five years ago, but there is still no sign of their return. I am trying to distract myself with my own rituals of spring activity, weeding and digging over the vegetable beds, emptying the compost bin, concentrating on the return of life beneath my feet and the sensations of seed sparkling through my fingers into bare soil.
From inside the polytunnel, I can hear a croaking mass of frogs in our small pond. I’ve been listening to the graceful oratorio of a blackbird at dusk, and working late in the garden, I have heard the first echoes of a tawny owl from deep in the wood. And once the eerie drumming of snipe rising from hollows in the field. I am spending as much time in the garden as I can, on the off chance of hearing them. I know that my mind is hankering over a missing piece of the jigsaw.
I’m on my way to the compost heap with a bucket of weeds when I hear it. Hesitant at first, my attention is seized by the first inkling of a familiar call. It could just be the imitation of a starling, maverick jesters that they are. A false alarm perhaps. I pause, wondering which way it’s going to go. Then the trilling upwards of that unmistakeable bubbling call, somewhere out there high on the fell, a dazzling rush of sound, looping and rising, sprinkling the air with mournful, tender insistence. Cuuurl-ee. Cuuurl-ee. Cuuurl-ee. The trembling overflow, rising and falling. Overlapping calls. There are two of them. I’m standing there on the garden path, rooted to the spot with a yellow plastic bucket in my hands, feeling hammered by a flood of joyous relief. And for a few brief moments standing there and listening, nothing, absolutely nothing else matters.
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For further information on curlew conservation, visit Curlew Recovery Partnership, Curlew Action, Curlew Life, WWT , Northern Upland Chain Local Nature Partnership and Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust.
Gwennie Fraser lives in Northumberland National Park. She writes about nature, place and belonging. She was awarded a commission by Hexham Book Festival in 2019, ‘Exploring Rural Realities’, and is currently working on a book project, a collection of fieldnotes and reflections gathered from wild edges of the UK. Some of her work has been published on the John Muir Trust website in ‘Wild Moment’, and her poem ‘Single Track, Coigach’ was part of the Trust’s 40th anniversary Creative Freedom exhibition in 2024. You can follow her on Instagram here.