Bog Myrtle & Peat

In his indispensable book Galloway and the Borders, the naturalist Derek Ratcliffe frames the curlew’s former abundance in Galloway against the principal stumbling block which confronts the would-be conservationist today – “Regrettably, I never counted curlew numbers [in Galloway post WW2] and – as far as I am aware – neither did anybody else; so there is nothing to back my claim that this was some of the best curlew ground in Britain”.

That’s my problem in a nutshell. As I continue to stick pins in the map for my curlew survey, I’m painfully aware that whatever number I reach in the end will be the first of its kind; without precedent or context, it will stand on the edge of meaninglessness. I know that the birds are doing badly, but even after all the legwork and chasing of leads, I’ll never know how many birds have already gone or even where we started. But a number still has value beyond the start of future surveys; a number is compelling in a way that flabby words like less or not so many cannot touch. It’s a first step, although I must say that early results seem to suggest that while I forecast my hope to find a hundred pairs, the final total is likely to be something less than half that number.

But anecdotal reports of the curlew’s former prosperity have a more insidious impact on this work as well. When I went to the Mart on Monday morning, I couldn’t help but ask around and find some leads on where the curlews were. I asked nine farming friends if they had curlews on their land. I was pretty sure that five of these guys would have curlews, and if the other four didn’t, they might’ve seen birds going around. Every single one of those farmers confirmed that they had curlews, and some even laughed at the suggestion that I’d have to ask. “Of course!” said a pal of my uncle’s who keeps cattle beyond Springholm.

Feeling increasingly silly, I followed up the question by asking if they’d seen the birds back this year. Each man thought about it, seeming puzzled. Come to think of it, they said, four of them hadn’t seen curlews this year. When pressed and with time to think, one of them even reckoned it might’ve been almost ten years since he’d seen curlews breeding on his land. The memory was hitched to a hundred others and bracketed under the universal “By Christ, but doesn’t time fly”. That was a useful lesson for me. It seemed like most of the current crop of farmers grew up believing that curlews were an infinite presence in the landscape – they’d never paused to think of the birds as anything like a reason for concern. Pinned down to focus on curlews in isolation, the situation was rendered both real and personal.

This is one of the first and most resounding obstacles I’ve found in this project so far. It’s not that people don’t care about curlews; they just can’t believe that there’d ever be a problem with a species that was always so abundant. As if to confirm this, of the four farmers who’d lost their curlews, three reckoned “they must’ve gone somewhere else”.

Of the remaining guys I spoke to, three of them said they weren’t sure if birds had returned in 2022. That’s fair enough. Two of them hadn’t been out on the hill much, and there’s no doubt this is a busy time of year. And it’s no criticism of modern shepherding, but it’s worth noting that what farmers gain from using quad bikes, they often lose from a wider experience of the land. If you’re going round the sheep on a bike, you’re liable to miss everything that doesn’t spring up from the rushes before you – you can’t hear a thing, and on rough ground you’re usually looking where you’re going.

Further, when I go out to look for black grouse on foot, I’m often forced to get up far earlier than I have to in the morning to beat the sound of quad bikes and shepherds on their early rounds. The sound of a lek can travel for a mile or more, but at long range the vibration of an ATV’s engine can warp to overlay the wobbly sound of a blackcock. If you’re on the hill after 6am, you’ll struggle to hear much on account of quad bikes – so it’s not surprising that farmers with an engine between their knees can fail to clock a great deal of what’s going on. I don’t think that’s unfair, particularly since most shepherds aren’t out there for the joy of birdsong anyway.

Two final farmers said they definitely hadn’t seen birds returning, and I know them well enough to be sure they wouldn’t have missed a pair. They hadn’t really given it much thought and put the absence down to a cold spring. Curlews will be here soon, they said, as if trying to reassure me. I’ll keep in touch and see if their birds do return.

I got a great deal from this exercise. It’s fascinating to understand how people perceive change, particularly when those people can be both drivers of and remedy for issues like curlew decline. But alongside these diverting lessons, I have to record the simple fact that since Monday, I’ve walked eight of the nine farms owned by those nine farmers, all of whom in the first instance assured me that they had curlews. Only one had a single pair.

As always, if you see curlews in the Urr catchment east to the Nith, please let me know at gallowaycurlew@gmail.com – my enormous thanks to everybody who’s been in touch so far – particularly the farmers who have helped so much.