Bog Myrtle & Peat

Curlews have become a symbol of biodiversity crisis in the UK. People are working to protect the birds in every corner of the country, and they’ve become a powerful rallying point for a wide variety of different interests, from upland gamekeepers to regenerative farmers in the lowlands. In this context, each part of the UK finds itself facing a different piece of the curlew puzzle, and it’s clearly a national problem with an endlessly local aspect.

Here in Galloway, it may be too late to save curlews, but the wider Scottish picture is a mixture of hope and concern. Away from core strongholds in the Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales, the English situation is significantly worse – some isolated populations of curlews in the south of England are desperately fragile and marginal. In these places, conservationists have begun to develop new techniques to protect curlews, from building electric fences around their nests to hatching chicks in captivity and releasing them into the wild; a process called “head-starting”.

Some of these techniques are very new, but they’re already becoming part of the accepted toolbox of curlew conservation. It’s maybe worth remembering that there’s nothing conventional about this kind of work, which lies at the most extreme end of interventionist conservation. Just as ecological baselines shift and each new generation accepts its own status quo of biodiversity, it’s surprising how quickly people have begun to accept some frighteningly hands-on and demanding conservation techniques. I suppose the acceptance is rendered easier to swallow by a wider realisation that unless this kind of work is carried out, curlews will vanish. But at the same time, there’s a parallel discussion to be had about what a curlew really is – and whether, if the bird is wholly dependent on a man-made life-support mechanism, it’s really still a curlew after all.

I’ve done enough work on curlews here in Galloway to realise that nest losses are one of the biggest causes of curlew decline. Despite all kinds of predator control, most eggs simply don’t survive long enough to hatch. Even when I’m doing all I can, productivity doesn’t improve – but that’s not an immutable fact of life; it’s largely a consequence of laws which protects some nest predators. So I’m starting to reckon that putting an electric fence around curlew nests might help to ameliorate that single problem, knowing that once curlew chicks have hatched (and survived their first few daft days of idiocy), their chances of success dramatically improve. We have some excellent chick-rearing habitat here, and it’s a constant frustration that chicks rarely survive to use it. So if I was to try electric fencing, I could satisfy myself that I was addressing a single pinch-point in a journey that’s otherwise fairly sound.

The process of head-starting is a very different kettle of fish. Taking eggs from the wild, hatching them in captivity and then rearing chicks to fledging age feels like a response to something that’s systematically broken from root to branch. Curlews are unusually popular birds and people will go to extraordinary lengths to support them, but the process of head-starting represents a shockingly expensive, intensive way to address their declines.

Some people say that it’s only a temporary stop-gap; a means of artificially buoying productivity in places where numbers are in freefall. Habitat restoration is often slow, and I agree that there are many places where conditions cannot improve quickly enough to help the birds. Head-starting might allow these places to retain birds just long enough for them to “go wild” again – but to me it seems like we’re making a treadmill for ourselves; a punishingly hands-on regime which will be hard to drop. And once we’ve muddied the waters of what’s self-sustaining, it will be very difficult to walk away.

I absolutely commend the people who have gone down this road. I know what it’s like to feel something valuable slipping away – you’ll do anything to keep it, and this blog article is nothing like criticism at all. It’s clear that curlews have come to mean something beyond themselves, and the continual experience of losing birds feels like a profound sense of ecological disempowerment. Put simply, many of us still have hope that we can reverse biodiversity loss. Having rallied that hope around the emblematic curlew, we’ll surely suffer a punishing loss of confidence if we are beaten back from what already feels like “a last stand”. These are the terms through which I understand and sympathise with head-starting; the simple logic that we cannot afford to lose this fight.

But I’m also nagged with doubt. Behind the surge of widespread popular support, it’s clear that some people regard curlew conservation as rather silly – the deliberate exaltation of a single species without due regard to its failing ecology. Several years ago, the popular controversialist Chris Packham was slammed for arguing that we should let panda bears die out – that the money spent on conserving this single species would be better spent on broader and more pressing concerns. People were outraged, but the argument does make perfect sense.

There are financial and ecological arguments here that I’m scarcely able to join – I’m rather more at home on the subjective, emotional front. And to be honest, I’m not sure where I stand just yet. I’m thinking aloud, but at least in part, we love curlews because they remind us of wild places and a countryside that we didn’t have to worry about. At quite a fundamental level, that’s what these birds represent. So I’m battling to resist the horribly rational rubric that if we cannot keep these birds wild and true to their old point of origin (and the landscape that loved them), perhaps it’s right that we should lose them.