Creative Irish Curlews

There is an extraordinary passage in What the Curlew Said – Nostos Continued by the Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty.  He describes listening to a curlew calling on a beach in County Kerry.

“What an unearthly aria that call was.

Sometimes I would think, it isn’t a call at all.

But if it isn’t, what is it?

Is it a spontaneity of eternity that has somehow come through into time?

Hearing his voice, a god who had made the curlew would almost instantly want to remake himself as the thing he had made.

Photo by Peter Rutt

Universes he couldn’t call into being with a human voice he could call into being with the voice of a curlew.”

Few other birds evoke such strong images - other worlds, other universes, other ways of being. But when you hear a curlew call, it is not so difficult to understand.  To listen to the clear, sharp “curlee, curlee,” firing like arrows across the horizon, or to the urgent crescendo of bubbling notes rippling out over the bog, is to hear mystical music that touches something deep in our psyche.  John Moriarty is not the first to be enchanted by curlews, and he will not be the last.

The Irish have woven this stilty-legged, crescent-billed wading bird into their lives for as long as there has been myth, music, parable and poetry. They appear in the earliest folktales where they are storm birds, warning fishermen to turn their boats for home, or farmers of oncoming rain.  They are said to have saved St Patrick from drowning when they called him to shore when he was lost at sea in heavy mist. A medieval monk, disturbed from his nightly prayers, wrote, “The Curlew cannot sleep at all/His voice is shrill across the deep/Reverberations of the storm;/Between the streams he will not sleep.” It is a bird of the wild, wet fields and bogs, of windswept estuary and rocky shore. For many it is the quintessential voice of the wilderness. It is also the sound of internal desolation - a broken heart. W B Yeats refers to curlews many times in his writings, most famously in his poem, “He Reproves the Curlew”

O curlew cry no more to the air,

Or only to the water in the West;

Because your crying brings to my mind

Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair

That was shaken out over my breast.

There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.

The cry of the curlew has been used throughout time to expresses fear, mysticism, lost love, joy and wild places. It is a malleable, shape-shifting call that has ignited many creative sparks.  It is one of the great gifts of the natural world that in its variety of colour, shape and sound it helps us to express the intangible and to give voice to inner feelings.  The creatures and landscapes of the earth are part of our creativity and fundamental to a vibrant culture.  “It seems to me,” said David Attenbrough, “that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”

It would be a tragedy then, to allow the Curlew, a bird that has provided so much inspiration, to slip away. If Ireland allows the curlew to fall silent, it loses so much more than just another species, it loses part of Irish heritage. In the late 1980s there were around 5,000 curlews breeding throughout the country, they were a common sight and anyone over the age of 40 will remember them.  The first national Curlew survey was completed by NPWS in 2017 and there are now less than 130 pairs left. That is an astonishing decline. It is not an exaggeration to say that Curlew are facing extinction in Southern Ireland in less than 10 years. That sentence is almost too hard to write, it sounds like extreme fear-mongering - too exaggerated.  Yet the figures are stark.  The graph of Curlew population plotted against time plummets downwards and will hit zero very soon indeed. And this has happened on our watch.

Curlew on Malahide beach

Ignorance is no excuse in law, but it seems to be in conservation. When I walked across Ireland, Wales and Scotland in 2016 to raise awareness about the decline of the Curlew, I was astonished how few people knew what was happening to this once common bird.  And that included nature lovers and bird watchers.   Our interconnected, info-rich world is somehow failing when it comes to connecting us with the life that lives all around. How do we bridge that gap?  What will energise us to take an interest and to act? Because if we don’t, then one day very soon we will look out over bog and field and realise the curlew sings no more.

The disappearance of curlews is due to a perfect storm of inappropriate forestry, draining of wet land, intensification of fields, increase in predators such as foxes and crows and the mass stripping of bogs. There are no easy solutions, but there are ways forward that are being explored by the Curlew Task Force, set up in January 2017. The Curlew Task Force is a unique working group of farmers, conservationists, foresters, turf cutters, academics and the NPWS, who are determined to find ways to work together to help Curlew across Ireland.  As there are so few nests left in the Republic, time is of the essence.  The Curlew Conservation Programme is the primary vehicle for enacting conservation measures on the ground, where they matter most. Some nests will have electric fences erected around them to protect the eggs from foxes.  Increased fox and crow control in the nesting season will also give the chicks a greater chance of survival.  Cooperation with turf cutters and farmers to leave areas where birds are nesting until the chicks are fledged will give the birds added safety.  Vegetation can also be managed to give the curlews the varied heights of sward they need for nesting and feeding. Eggs are often laid in long grass for protection but growing chicks need to feed in shorter grass with lots of insects. In some bogs, drainage ditches will be blocked to re-wet the ground, which curlews prefer for nesting, and softer ground is easier to probe by their long, sensitive bills. Agreements with foresters will be sought to protect nesting and foraging sites from plantations.

And while the land managers and professional conservationists do their work, the rest of us must learn to listen out for and to love the Curlew again.  Understanding what is happening to them is vital to halt the decline. Raising awareness about where they breed and what they need has to be increased. We need to teach our children to recognise their beautiful calls, and to tell them the stories and poems that celebrate this birds’ long association with culture. We need to go out on a warm summer evening and revel in that fluty trill - that sound of the Irish summer – that has inspired poets and mystics through time.

Ireland has a long and rich connection to nature, the roots are there, they only need be nurtured once again for Ireland to be truly green and full of life.  Bringing back the Curlew from the brink of extinction as a breeding bird will be a huge positive step towards a brighter future for all of life on the Emerald Isle.

World Curlew Day is on April 21, my book Curlew Moon is out on April 19, published by William Collins.

Oh - and the fabulous World Curlew Day logo was designed by my cousin Nicola Duffy from Letterkenny!

The Hills are Alive

Its all kicking off in curlew land, they are streaming back to breeding grounds now and is great to get the reports from all over the country. People are posting on Twitter about hearing them and seeing them, and on Facebook, they are working their magic again this year.  The harbingers of spring are back and ready for action.

The first curlews arrived back in lowland areas in February, the more upland birds are just getting there.  In Northern Ireland the curlews in Antrim are said to come back to the hills on St Patrick's Day - which was the 17th March.

Slemish Mountain, Antrim, where St Patrick was held captive.
From http://mountainviews.ie/summit/667/

Mike Smart, a curlew watcher and recorder in Gloucestershire, and all round good egg, wrote a great description a couple of weeks ago of two birds that had just got to a meadow in his area:

"They seem to me 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 together 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.  On one occasion, the male opened his wings slightly and did a couple of flaps, and seemed to hold his tail up, rather like a Snipe; but I haven’t seen the slow ballet with outstretched quivering wings yet."

Others are reporting the same kind of behaviour, and Noel Kiernan who watches curlews on the wild and beautiful islands on Lough Ree in S Ireland also noticed 5 pairs behaving as though they were gearing up to breeding. That lovely bubbling call will soon be trailing over the meadows and moors of Britain and Ireland - well I hope so.  Actually, not so much in Ireland as there are only 130 pairs left, but where they still hang on these wild songsters will be adding joy to people's lives in a way that cannot by valued by money.

Lough Ree from http://www.viewmounthouse.com/things-to-do/places/lough-ree

All of us curlew lovers will be watching and waiting to see how this season progresses and if curlews can hang in in our very human world. To keep this wild sprite though is a challenge, we may not be prepared to do what it takes to make room for uneconomic species, no matter how lovely and joyous they are. But I don't actually believe that - I think we will make it happen, because we are not just consumers, we are so much more.  No one just thinks about money.  We have so much in our lives that we don't put a pound sign next to. We don't charge for the time it takes to read a book, or walk outside, make a birthday cake, spend time with someone who needs us. We don't think about money when it comes to love, affection, respect, - those soul moments.

Photos by permission of Tony Cross

Post the Ireland and Slimbridge conferences more people are now involved in monitoring the birds and working out the best way to protect them - in ways that are suitable for their bit of the world.  perhaps that is putting signs up to tell dog walkers to keep dogs on leads around a known nest site until mid July.  Or maybe nests in some places may need electric fences to stop the eggs being eaten (but they won't stop the chicks being got unfortunately). Or even some lethal predator control is required in certain problem areas for the time of breeding?  Stocking density might have to be reduced.  It is all about what is needed where, and we need to have open and positive discussions about the way forwards.

But so far, the 2 conferences have shown just how much we British and Irish love these birds (and so much else too).  We don't want them to disappear, we don't just want to make money out of the land. It is clear to me we want a singing planet, not just a money-making one.  

If you are on Twitter search for curlew or curlews and you will get some great pictures and heartening tweets about the birds.  I am so grateful for those who write to me to tell me what is happening - and for being involved in the curlew groups as they gear up for the next few months.

Curlews are in a better place than they were a year ago - thank you to everyone who has been so supportive and for those rolling up their sleeves now and getting down to the serious business of looking after our birds.

Author Kathryn Norbury (The Fish Ladder) suggested making a Year of the Curlew.  Bit late for this year - but next?  Seems a great idea!

The Four Relationships

The devastating news about the number of breeding curlews in Ireland has been difficult to take.  120 pairs left in the whole of the country.  This year there is only one pair breeding in County Sligo,  a rugged county of 2000 sq km of mountains, bogs and wet meadows.  It should be curlew heaven.  There maybe two pairs in the adjacent Country Roscommon. Ireland is a country that used to have many thousands of breeding birds.  And it is not just curlews that are slipping over the edge into oblivion.  Corncrakes have already gone apart from some remote outposts in the west.  Lapwings are in freefall.  There is a decline in birds throughout Europe, but Ireland seems to fare the worst.  We are watching the extinction of a beautiful, elegant bird for no other reason than a western lifestyle that is all about consumption. Our desire for lots of cheap everything is satieated by economic and farming systems based on bigger, better, faster all the ime.

So here we go again - the system is screwed so what can we do?  Well, we can try to do the right thing for ourselves.

It seems to me that there are four relationships we must have in balance to live full, healthy, flourishing lives, and to allow other life on earth to thrive alongside us.  They are (1) our relationship with ourselves, (2) with God (whatever that term means to you), (3) with each other and (4) with the earth. As individuals, it seems to me that we are like the circle of a Celtic cross. The circle repersents the essence of who we are, and it is kept in shape by four arms pulling with equal tension - the four relationships

No one relationship should be allowed to distort the roundness - if one relationship becomes dominant then the  circle will go out of shape and become contorted.  Keeping these four relationships in balance is essential. If they are not balanced we see religious extremism as the relationship with God becomes all consuming.  We wage war/fight/hurt when the relationship with each other is weak.  We become greedy or self harming when we neglect ourselves.  And the earth - what about that forgotten, neglected relationship with the earth?  The one relationship that is so often taken for granted?   Well, ecosystems are damaged, biodiversity thinned, animals treated with cruelty and other forms of life are viewed as merely a means to an end, namely food or products.

Four relationships - four essential bonds that keep the world and ourlseves in harmony.  Easy to preach isn't it -  hard to do when families need feeding, money if tight, we need to get around and we want a high standard of life with a rich diversity of food and abundant energy.  Keeping the realtionship with the earth in balance is as hard, if not harder, as maintaining the balance of the others.

The problem is all of them require sacrifice - a word that is so neglected today when we are told we can have it all - as long as we can pay for it, or borrow the money.  If the world's religions have one huge job to do it is to remind us that life involves self-sacrifice. All of them have times of abstinence built into their teachings, often on a yearly cycle.  These are times when we are asked to be restrained and to contemplate.  These times of less are then interspersed with festivals and times of abundance. Somehow that seems a balanced and healthy approach.

I don't want Christmas to start in September or Easter in January.  I don't want organic mangoes all year round.  I don't want cheap meat at the cost of suffering for millions of animals.

And what about curlews? They are disappearing as land is converted into intensive agriculture to provide cheap food, and 50% of it is thrown away.

So curlews are the collateral damage of a society that has become distorted.  We don't leave them, and so many other creatures, room to live and just be.  All of the land is for us and our "needs" though it is hard to believe that this is the only way for humanity to survive.

I leave with the wisest of farmers - Wendell Berry -

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope. 

Curlew Song

I gave a talk at New Networks for Nature conference last November, a précis of the talk is here.  Listening were a folk singing duo called Barron Brady who had provided the music for the event.  Ros has a clear, intense voice and Simon plays the guitar beautifully.  I talked about the role religions have in the conservation movement and used curlews, not as an example of creatures in decline, but as a bird that can be viewed in many different ways.

A curlew can be Numenius arquata to the scientifically minded, it can be "a thought of God" as Thomas Merton would have said.  They can be seen as specific creation of Allah, or as a spark of light from the flame of Lord Shiva.  They could even just be a brown bird with a long nose and a beautiful bubbling call.  All are valid, all have a place at the table.

After the conference Ros contacted me to ask more about curlews and I told her the story of St Bueno's prayer book being rescued from the waves by a curlew.  St Bueno then supposedly blessed the bird and said it should be forever protected.  That blessing worked well for a long time, but needs a refresh now.  St Bueno's feast day is April 21st, the day I set off on my 500 mile walk.

Well, today Barron Brady sent me this haunting song.  Thank you to them, its a fitting tribute to a fabulous bird.

Radio Stoke, Midlands Today and News

It was a Midlands media fest yesterday.  Here is the interview I did for BBC Radio Stoke at 7.20 am on 14th March.

I then went to the Roaches on the Staffordshire Moorlands to be filmed for Midlands Today.  But it goes offline at 7.00 pm on 16th March.

And this news report too appeared.

BBC Wildlife Magazine - Faith and Nature

I wrote an article for the March edition of  BBC Wildlife Magazine on the role religions can/should/must play in conservation.

Faith in Nature

Guest Blog for Mark Avery on Curlews

Photo by John Walters

My guest blog for Mark Avery on why I love curlews and what I'm going to do to help them recover.

500 miles for curlew

Please help spread the word about my walk for curlew, beginning April 21st.

The Curlew Walk - Flyer

Goshawk in the woods.

I'm reading H is for Hawk at the moment, a searing book by Helen McDonald.  It is ostensibly about training a goshawk, but it is so much more than that.  It is a book about loss and obsession, history and wildlife. It tells of her response to her terrible grief at the unexpected death of her father, interweaved with the emotional trauma of training a goshawk as a kind of memorial.  She constantly refers back to the famous T E White book The Goshawk, published in 1951, another searing book, but this one is brutal, "a metaphysical battle" as McDonald describes it.

To say that McDonald's book is emotional is a tad understated.  Blood and tears seep out of the pages, and swirling around them is a mist of madness.

"The world around me was growing very strange indeed.  The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater.  Things sat in it dark and very still.  Sometimes I felt I was living in a house at the bottom of the sea.  There were imperceptible pressures.  Tapping water pipes.  I'd hear myself breathing and jump at the sound. Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn't touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre away from my skin, something vastly wrong, making infinite the distance between me and all the familiar objects of my house....And I walked and worked and made tea and cleaned the house and cooked and ate and wrote.  But at night, as rain picked points of orange light against the windows, I dreamed of a hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else.  I wanted to follow it"

I haven't finished it yet, but with these images sharp in my mind yesterday evening I walked through Blaise Castle woodland near Bristol.  It was pouring with rain and getting dark, producing another humid, close night.  All the while a piercing, incessant cry kept forcing its way into my thoughts. When people say cries "rent the air" it is a good description, it really did seem to tear the fabric of the woods.  I followed this demonic sound down a track to an opening and found a man and his son stooped over a young female goshawk.  The bird was beautiful but crazed.  It constantly yelled as it tore at a bloodied carcass.  If he tried to put a gloved hand near her she attacked it. Grey and striped with black and rust, she had a weapon for a beak and her beady black eyes had the stare of a devil.  She kept lifting her head and screaming, looking at me, then him, then my Jack Russell. "I'd call her away if I were you," he advised, "she's protective over meat."

"In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats.  Bigger, yes.  But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, much harder to see.  Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they're the birdwatchers' dark grail."

I asked the man if she was hard to train.  "Of course, all she wants to do is hunt," he said.  "They are supreme predators and I have to gain her trust.  She's screaming out of frustration that I have to feed her and that she can't catch birds herself. In the US its easier to train them, they can let young birds hunt in the wild straight away, but we can't here, so I have to give her meat and she hates it.  She hates being dependent."

I watched for 15 minutes, mesmerised by the shrill, vibrating bundle of feathers and talons.  Eventually I left them, hunched over against the rain and failing light, waiting for the bird to devour the remaining scraps of red.  It was almost dark, but the cries of a raging, frustrated goshawk followed me all the way to the car and back home. I felt like a character in the book.

Tiree

Tiree is a stunning island.  First impressions are muted - it seems very flat and the houses dotted erratically over the landscape, more lowland Scandinavia or the Netherlands than Scotland.  But the drive from the ferry to the campsite is a continuous introduction to wonder.  First of all a man suddenly stopped his car in the middle of the road and tried to shoo a young tern into the grass, all the while being dive bombed by screaming adults.  Then a hare bounded alongside drawing the eye to the glory that is the carpet of machair.

A riot of colour in miniature - small plants have a big punchy presence when you take a ground level view.  Shrink yourself down to a few inches high and talk a walk - you could be wandering through a William Morris print.  Yellows, pinks, whites, purples dot the canvas, the soft background hues provided by the grasses, the bold look-at-me shouty plants provided by the ragworts and bigger orchids.  It is beautiful and no artist could ever design anything as lovely.

And to top it all the birds appear to add a varied musical score.  Wheeling, alarmist flocks of lapwings, chunky, honking flocks of greylag geese, grating corncrakes, highly strung oyster catchers and my favourite of all time - the elegantly gawky curlew.  I've never seen so many curlew. They peer out of the grass, they strut along the fields, they stand lonely as a cloudy curlew on the rocks by the sea.  They crane their necks to see if they should be moving on and then suddenly go, crying and bubbling.   Curlew are  a kit bag of unlikely parts but so adapted to wild, windswept moors, coasts, estuaries and dank fields.  I watched them whenever I could.

On a bike ride a female hen harrier flew very close to the road.  I jammed on my brakes, causing my son to do a front wheel handstand and explode with a stream of choice language.

Grey seals often popped up to check out the action - they look like giant beer bottles bobbing in the sea.  We never saw the illusive otters though, despite being told they are pretty common.

I loved Tiree as a place to think, walk, cycle, run, watch wildlife, practice juggling, fall off windsurfers (me) or shoot the waves (my eldest son) or collapse after off-roading (my youngest son).

I do have a couple of pieces of advice though.  If you plan on camping and decide to spend a lot of money on an extension to a small campervan, make sure the attachment that attaches said extension to said van is the right size.  And if it is blowing a hooley (which it often is) make sure you bag your spot in the campervan first, otherwise you spend the night sleeping in the equivalent of a very loud crisp packet.

BBC Wildlife Magazine and Meditation

Unbelievably chuffed to be number 27 in the top 50 power list for  conservation heroes in this month's BBC Wildlife Magazine.  Very flattered indeed.  I think this wildlife dedicated magazine is a great read these days.  It had a facelift a while ago and became far more focussed and energetic. Really interesting articles (and I'm not just saying that!)

I spent the morning giving a talk to the Bristol Christian Meditation Group, part of a worldwide movement to promote meditation from any faith or from non.  They were interested in how faith could play a part in promoting a greater awareness of our relationship with nature.  The audience were lovely, engaged and asked some searching questions.

I gave the talk a strange title - Being a Christian and a Mammal. For too long Christianity (and many other faiths) has put humanity aside from nature, regarding people as floating, spiritual beings that are removed from the nitty gritty, mess and joy of the natural world.  The common approach is that the earth is a resource that supports us, not an integral part of what we are.  I wanted to stress our mammalian nature, place us in a evolutionary context, look at what drivers shaped the way we look, act and interact with the world around us.  How we evolved an upright stance, developed forward looking vision, why we developed complex language, how we formed social groups and the consequences of that.  The tribalism, gossip, group sizes that we adopt - all driven by our evolution and the pressures we responded to in nature.  I also wanted to point out how much of the earth is hidden from our senses as we developed our complex brains.  How we miss so much of what is happening around us, the colour spectrums we can't see, the vibrations we can't feel, the electrical fields we can't detect and the sounds outside our hearing.

Is it important to think of ourselves as mammalian as well as spiritual?  Or is this intellectualising and only useful for middle England chatter?  I think it is important to look into our deep-time roots and think about our long history on earth.  Because if we regard ourselves as separate from all that out there then we will have a relationship that is based on difference, not connection. We will have an intellectual relationship.  It also leads to a kind of paternalism towards the natural world and the extraordinary creatures we live alongside.  Too often the religious approach is either utilitarian or overly sentimental.  We are told to look for God is in the beauty of a butterfly or flower, or in the majesty of a mountain.  But what about God in the ebola virus or malarial parasite?  In the Nepalese earthquake?  If God is only in the appealing things then when disaster strikes or a snake bites or a child dies of malaria, we don't know how to process it.

It was a good morning, thanks to the organisers for asking me.

John Muir Reviews

Here are some previews of John Muir - The Scotsman Who Saved America's Wild Places

JohnMuir - Book Cover

John Muir changed the world - yet in this country we know almost nothing of him. Perhaps it's true that a prophet is without honour in his own land, but Mary Colwell is seeking to put that right, and she does him justice in this lively and accessible account. I hope it ensures that he now achieves the recognition in his homeland that is long overdue -- George Monbiot 

John Muir is now regarded as the father of the great American national parks, a man who was far ahead of his time when he urged Americans to balance their headlong rush to development with a respect for nature, and especially for their unique wilderness areas. In this book, Mary Colwell, writer and film-maker, presents a clear and engaging account of Muir's harsh upbringing in Scotland, and his later public role in the United States, where he led by example, living off the land in a minimal way, and writing powerfully about his love of Nature -- Professor Mike Benton FRS

This is a most important biography. As environmentalists we may feel that we already know the man and his achievements but Mary Colwell gives us the whole life which is much less familiar. It was complex and not always easy. From harsh beginnings both physical and mental Muir emerged as a great speaker and writer about the natural world with huge influence in the USA and beyond. The most compelling aspect of Muir's character is that, from childhood, he had an intense emotional and spiritual response to nature in all its forms. Colwell emphasises this at every point in her biography and correctly so. This is his key message to us now. We need to love the Earth for only from love can we generate a proper concern without which our species has no long-term future. -- Professor Aubrey Manning OBE 

In his Foreword, Jonathon Porritt says 'John Muir was indeed a quite extraordinary man ... the author eloquently captures what it was that made him so special "as a naturalist, pioneering explorer, botanist, glaciologist, mystic, writer and activist."' -- Jonathon Porritt 

'As this book so beautifully makes clear, John Muir deserves to better known by British naturalists. Read this and meet the man whose writing, commitment and integrity persuaded a president that nature matters.' -- Professor Tim Birkhead FRS