Page 43 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #05

Clockwise from typical of spring, spirals and flutes across heather hills
top left: curlews and rushy farmland, heralding warmer days.
are Europe’s
largest waders, George Bolam, a 19th-century Northumbrian
with a bill like naturalist, wrote: “A moor without a curlew is like a night
no other; the without a Moon, and he who has not eyes for the one and
birds form winter an ear for the other is a mere body without a soul.” So
flocks; listen out numerous were upland curlews, and so evocative their
for their evocative
calls in spring; calls, they wove themselves into our folklore. Sometimes,
curlews favour they were feared. Their night-time alarm calls, a harsh
moorland and barking, became the embodiment of evil spirits bringing
rough pasture death to the family, or even the end of the world. Curlews
in summer, but
estuaries and became Jekyll and Hyde characters: bright singers of
marshes in winter. beautiful songs by day; eerie, bringers of doom at night.
‘SHEEP
WRE
SO
CKED’
‘SHEEPWRECKED’ SOIL
The uplands, though, ar re not unmanaged wilderness. Over
i
the last century they’ve increasingly been drained, planted
and the abundant mud-dwelling food. with forestry and more i intensively grazed. Wales, for
Come spring The Wash empt ties as example, acquired Euro pe’s densest population of sheep in
the breeding season begins an nd many the 1980s, encouraged b
by subsidies. Poor old sheep – once
of these curlews return to Sca andinavia, hailed as gentle dwellers s on wild hillsides, they were vilified
France and Germany, leaving g our own birds as “woolly maggots” by n
naturalist Iolo Williams, while the
scattered increasingly thinly a across the land. environmental campaig gner George Monbiot called the
So while curlews may seem plentiful, it’s landscape they produced
d a “sheepwreck”.
an illusion; they’re fast becoming rare. The Welsh curlew nu
umbers crashed and continue to fall,
ng taken off the hills in many places.
official data from the BTO B Breeding Bird Atlas, despite sheep bein
covering the period 2007–11 1, estimates that there The growth of the e leisure industry has also taken its
K’s uplands, with disturbance by dog
are 66,000 pairs in the UK. . But I find this hard to toll in all of the UK
believe today. And here’s wh hy… walkers, ramblers, mo ountain bikers and horse riders an
The stronghold for curlew ws is, and always increasing factor. It’ s hardly surprising that there are
has been, the northern, upla and areas of the fewer upland curle ews today than just 50 years ago.
UK. Thousands breed on moorlands, in-bye But the biggest t losses of curlews have been in the
farmland and high grazed pasture in Scotland lowlands. It’s onl ly in the past 100 years or so that
and northern England, arriv ving in late winter to the green fields and wildflower meadows of the
set up territories. Their mag gnificent bubbling call, British Isles hav ve been graced with these wonderful
Spring 2018 BBC Wildlife 43