Bog Myrtle & Peat

There are curlew feathers on the English side of the Solway at Silloth. What with the wind in the west, the strandline’s ghosted with the moultings, and you could easily gather them in bundles of ten or a dozen at a time. It’s that moment in the year when the birds drop their old feathers and replace them, and as the tide sags, many of the curlews which teem into the open merse from the saltings are jagged and saw-toothed with missing primaries. Some of these birds will have come to the Solway to lick their wounds after a challenging summer. They’ll have lost their eggs or chicks on the hills, and finally followed the old streams down to the fat, restoring sea. But others will be youngsters of the year, and some will be biding their time in adolescence before they’re called to try for chicks of their own. 

It’s hard to find meaning in these curlews as they turn to a standstill on the mud. If they haven’t come from elsewhere, the chances are they’ll soon be moving on – and each bird moults as it moves, so the feathers I gathered during an hour’s walk may have belonged to curlews which are now in the Republic of Ireland, or down in some Breton creek. And the same birds might have cast other feathers from the same wing in Shetland, Dornoch or Montrose. 

From ringing and satellite tracking, we know how expansively curlews move around the world, but to the untrained eye they’re ever-present. We may hear curlews calling on the Solway in any week or month of the year, but what we don’t see is the shift and exchange of individuals. Chances are, those ten curlews which walk today on the clicking mud are not the same you’ll see there tomorrow – and in fact, it would blow their minds to realise how little we humans move by comparison. Luckily, they can’t tell us apart and discern that we almost never move. We spend so much time feeling bad for these birds; but in certain respects, they should pity us. 

Ringed plovers run between bloated wracks of weed. Oystercatchers drill and complain in the shingle, and the sea is shimmering beyond the distant stands of curlews. On the northern horizon, Scotland rises abruptly up from the mud again. Fifteen miles away, Criffel stands beneath mounds of weepy, rising cloud, and I’m not used to seeing my own home from this strange, exotic angle. Forget the curlew’s chain of interlinking moors and marshes which run from Russia to the north coast of Spain. I don’t even know both sides of the Solway Firth.