Bog Myrtle & Peat

I took photographs of curlew chicks through the mesh of a pen wall. They were curious and loud in the sunshine, but they preferred to stay back from us and maintained a wary distance. Sometimes one would dash forward to grab an insect which had risen from the grass, and there would be an audible click of its beak closing upon it. They only had short beaks, and nothing which had begun to bend downwards like an adult bird. These are simply chopsticks, but in time they’ll grow long and supple and the birds will probe at depth in the foreshore mud for ragworms and luggers. But for now, most of their nourishment is obtained from trays of crumb and pellet, and the percentage intake of protein is carefully monitored by professionals.

The birds have access to the correct ration, but quirks of purity and protein in processed meal mean that some of the youngsters develop a condition called “angel wing”; their primary feathers develop too quickly and the careful “zed” of the folded limb is unbalanced. The joint spills outwards, so instead of folding neatly across the back at rest, the “wrist” sticks out at right angles from the body. If it’s not corrected, this will become a permanent problem; the joints will become malformed, and while that’s no problem in terms of being able to fly, it rings up a range of potential issues down the line.

When I was a child, my mother had a goose with “angel wing”. It lived for many years, but that was a barnyard bird which never aspired to live by its own wit or ability. However, these curlews will be released to become wild, and they need to be perfect – not just for themselves, but also because this project’s reputation depends upon it. Eyebrows are already raised about the idea of hatching curlews in captivity and releasing them into the natural world. We are not used to thinking about this bird in terms of pale fragility, and something is certainly lost when human hands intrude. “Angel wing” could not happen to a wild bird. It’s a symptom of human interference, and the highly visible nature of the deformity means that it would be there for all to see. It would mark these birds as “factory seconds”, and they serve as a reminder that while we can rear curlews in captivity, the end product is a flawed imitation of the real thing.

The solution to “angel wing” is to wrap the birds which show early symptoms in bandages for a short period during the growth of their wing feathers. This can stabilise the shape and formation of wings and it’s usually enough to reverse the deformity, but it’s part of a wider cascade of problems which arise when humans remove wild birds from their place in the world. A problem caused by unnatural interventions can only be treated by further unnatural interventions, and the deeper you go, the deeper you need to go. You’ll never see a curlew with angel wings in the wild, but you may see a bird with perfect wings which owes that immaculate shape to binding and bandages. Of course you may choose to believe that it doesn’t matter, and the end result is all. But there’s a hidden cost, and for birds which are famously associated with wilderness and the natural world, there’s a shadow across the pedigree now.

And by the time they’re released into the wild, each one of these chicks will have cost the project around one thousand pounds. Natural capital enthusiasts have attempted to put a price on breeding birds so that farmers and land managers can be properly rewarded for conserving them. So we know that it costs a thousand pounds to place a curlew in the sky, and perhaps that’ll become a new benchmark. But the eggs from which these curlews came were taken from wild birds in Yorkshire, and the cost of rearing youngsters makes no allowance for the price of the nest from which they were taken. All we can say is that each chick reared in captivity costs a thousand pounds, and that figure takes us no closer to understanding a process which, until the 1970s, was delivered free of charge.

And that freedom from cost is mind-boggling to modern conservationists because it represents a time when the cup was overflowing. In the face of deep decline, and it’s harder than ever to imagine how these soft and vulnerable hand-reared birds could ever have prospered without human assistance. Monitoring their daily growth with scales and calipers, we’re discovering so many variables and threats that wild, unsupported productivity has begun to feel like a pattern of outrageous fluke – and decline is just the logical conclusion of something that was always doomed to fail. It’s a leap of faith to assume that healthy, balanced ecosystems provide these birds with everything they need, and I’m not surprised that we’re desperate to rescue them from a wilderness which seems to have betrayed them.

Faced with a pen of gorgeous, optimistic birds, it’s strange that I should feel so conflicted. It’s a good project, and the people involved are doing the very best they can – but we should not be in this position, and the simple act of rearing birds opens a web of strange and contradictory questions. Even if they do go on to breed and prosper now, something in that ancient chain has broken, and curlews will never feel quite so wild again.