Bog Myrtle & Peat

I found a dead curlew on the hill at Midsummer’s Eve. Something had grabbed it, puncturing the breast and arse-end with a puckle of wounds. The bird had flown on to wither and die soon afterwards, and I found the body lying meekly in a sheep track, dead for the day or perhaps a little longer. If I had found that bird ten years ago, I would have been desperately sad – but standing in the dusk and the dance of a million moths, I didn’t feel anything much. It looked strange and rather out of place, like some exotic migrant blown off course and doomed to live in pathetic exile. I sat beside it for a while. It was eleven o’clock, and a hare came up from the hawkbit. Roe barked, and roe barking was the sound of this midsummer, just as bracken was the smell.

And not wanting to waste a fortunate find, I went against my better judgement and placed the bird inside my bag. It lay there as I cycled home, out of place in the glen and gloaming fields; strange as a banana. Now it’s in my freezer, and that is the best I can do for conservation nowadays.

[July 2021]

It’s no unusual thing for a curlew to be killed by a puncturing bite like this – but it was extraordinary that I should have found this bird with its body intact in the aftermath. If I had gone another way up the hill road that night, I feel certain that it would have been picked up or scavenged by predators, leaving me none the wiser.

The scale of the hill and the scarcity of the birds upon it meant that I had very little to go on in those days – but time and again, I seemed to find the most important things by a simple fact of good luck and coincidence. I’m grateful for those ten or twelve years of hard work on that hill; time which I deliberately threw behind me under the impression that longevity bred wisdom. I learned a great deal, but never what I expected – and not without a rising rasp of pain and anxiety. I didn’t know that after years of decline, 2021 was the last year that curlews would try to breed on that hill. I had found the body of the last bird.

I knew that curlews were becoming scarce, and I surprised myself by placing that bird in my freezer for safekeeping. I hadn’t observed the difference between scarcity and ending – and I had no clear plans for what I should do with the corpse. I already had a dried curlew’s skull, several discarded feathers and half a dozen hand-blown curlew eggs which my grandfather gathered from the same hill in the 1920s. They’re so precious and fragile that I keep them shut away in a box to protect their colours from the sunlight. I don’t really know what to do with these things – they have no practical value, and I have little space in my life for ornaments or dust-gathering objects. 

I’m reasonably ambivalent about taxidermy, and I know that stuffing is nothing permanent anyway. The preservation of feathers and skins always ends with moth or distortion; the outcome is simply decay delayed – but there is a certain creative or curious itch which can be scratched by the act of stuffing a bird. It forces a degree of intimacy, and since the process cannot be buoyed or simplified by shop-bought kits, the ball is in the maker’s court. Beyond a few basic principles, taxidermy is a craft like any other – the skill is working out how to recognise and address various problems as they arise. Practice and repetition improve the end result, but there’s also a temptation to be more ambitious each time; to display wings and tails in certain postures to best advantage. You learn as you go, developing a practical “nuts and bolts” understanding of form and anatomy which compliments and enriches the experience of seeing birds and wildlife for real. I had reckoned to stuff this curlew, partly to commemorate the diminishment of an old continuity, but also to dig into these birds and know them better.

So I opened my curlew with a scalpel last week. I spent an evening shaping its skin towards a semblance of livelihood, and I found the work was immersive and distracting. Before starting, I had set the radio to play – when the battery ran out, I let it stop in silence; I simply couldn’t pull myself away from the task in hand. When it comes to birds, the crux of taxidermy is a process of drying. Bird skins are too fragile and thin to warrant tanning or preservation; you simply clean the skin, remove the meat and arrange the feathers as you’d like them to set. Once that’s done, the skin can shrink and clasp its form like paper. It follows that the whole thing needs to come together in a single swoop; once you’ve started, you’re committed to finish or fail.

I’d like to say that I gleaned some deep and illuminating lessons from working on this bird. I’d like to say that I know curlews better now, but it turns out that they’re really just a tangle flesh and bone. As a technical challenge, this bird was more straightforward than other waders I’ve tried because the skin was clean and light and there was little fat to worry about. Fat goes rancid and slips during the drying process – wildfowl and woodcock are greasy as pigs, and all the extra work of removing that oil can take many hours. I was glad to find this curlew was lean, dry and simple – but what I had loved about this bird was its life – and in its absence there was nothing I could love more from arm’s reach as half a mile across the moor.

I would guess that my curlew was a female because the beaks of female birds are noticeably longer than those of the males. By the same measure, I could only hazard a guess at her age; judging by the silvery tightness of tendons in her thighs and shoulders, she wasn’t young. In fact, my main observation is just how worn-out she was – not just by many years but primarily by her final year. The feathers on her back and shoulders had grown shattered and tatty with overuse; sharp edges had been blunted into roundness and patterning were simplified to base colours only. This bird died at the end of June, probably after failing to breed for many consecutive years on my hill. Curlews usually moult in July and August, and she was naturally overdue a fresh costume which would soon have begun to grow in – if only she’d survived. But the fade and tatter of this much-loved bird (which is now better described as a “specimen”) seemed to add a touch of poignancy to the end product.

I’m not that interested in keeping this curlew now. I was immersed in the action of stuffing her body, but that moment has passed and now I’m left with a decorative bauble which will gradually sag and crumble over the course of the next fifty years. It’s obvious that in focussing my attention upon skin and bones, I’ve missed the point and preserved the wrong thing – but in the moment of discovering this bird on Midsummer’s Eve in 2021, leaving her body to be eaten on the hill felt wrong too. The difference is that things felt possible then, and I hadn’t realised that it was over.