Bog Myrtle & Peat

There were curlews at Geltsdale on Good Friday. They stood in confiding pairs at the roadside, and hardly five minutes passed in the course of an hour without birds calling overhead. As the sun set, two birds were mating in the rushy stubble of a field which has been cut to enhance their habitats. The topmost bird was calling and paddling his wings, and I watched them until he slipped off and she shuffled her feathers back into place. Not long afterwards, a single curlew flew in quietly from elsewhere and walked between them.  

There are no curlews at home these days. A handful of pairs come back to the hill, but they seem to know the game is up and they’re circumspect in habit and carriage. I don’t hear or see them much, and the ties which bind them to these fields are slackening. When I am out at dawn to feed cattle, the best I can hope to hear is larks and meadow pipits. They rain around me like tickertape, and I’m drawn to them because there’s nothing else to catch my eye. I used to think of these little birds as junk and distraction; a warmup for the main event. It’s hard to hear them as a place in its entirety.

I took small comfort in the prosperity of Geltsdale’s curlews. It’s fifty miles from here to there as the curlew flies; I can see it from the top of my hill, but the North Pennines are nothing to do with me and the birds stand out like sore thumbs. Everything is tipped in their favour, and noticeboards explain the work that’s undertaken to keep them safe. It’s a nature reserve, and human beings are only allowed to work or visit on the condition that curlews come first. The people who own or manage this land have found new words to describe the former family farm. They call it “a site”, or a “study area”.

I went there because I wanted to hear a curlew in the spring, but I hadn’t anticipated how little curlews interest me. Of course they’re lovely birds, and the issues which arise around conserving them are endlessly complex and intriguing. But the birds themselves are only a pattern of muscle and feathers. You can hear the curlew’s famous call online, but stripped from the loving context of home, those recordings remind me that we’re only talking about a rearrangement of the breeze. 

Far beyond the hidden movement of wild birds, curlews mattered to me because our relationship felt personal. When we lived side by side, I would hear them calling whether I wanted to or not. They intruded upon my phonecalls and woke me in the night, and that’s where love sprang from. Curlews live for so long that some of our oldest birds would have remembered my grandfather in the fading days of his dominance. They would have seen the land succeed to my uncle and successive waves of old familiar shepherds and friends, many of whom noticed that fewer birds were returning to breed each spring. But their final disappearance still caught us by surprise, and it’s possible they had a better understanding of us than we did of them. 

It’s a dark scenario to imagine that a future for curlews in this country could only be at arm’s length. They could depart from the pattern of our lives and exist only in curlew places, familiarity confined to specialist bird watchers and hard-wired conservation professionals. Going to see curlews has become an uneasy experience because they have always come to see me.

I counter my personal loss with a wider realisation that extinction is grimly possible. The nature reserve model reminds us that it’s better to keep curlews in a handful of places than watch them vanish altogether. Perhaps it’s the only realistic future, but in the meantime it’s hard for me to gel with “curlew sites” and the pragmatist’s credo that “something is better than nothing at all”. I’m being selfish, but I have lost something I loved very dearly, and grief cannot be softened by a promise of more fish in the sea.