Curlews face bleak future

THE mournful call of the curlew resonates with the Irish psyche, a reminder of ancient tragedies, the great famine or the emigrant ship.

During the reign of the Celtic Tiger melancholy was out of fashion and the cry was at odds with the times. Alas, not any more.

Prospects are bleak for people and for the bird. Curlew numbers are falling and, according to Niall Hatch of BirdWatch Ireland, this wader may cease to breed here within a decade. A Cry of the Curlew Appeal has been launched to raise funds to save it.

The Atlas project is nearing completion. At 20-year intervals, a census of birds is carried out. Every nook and cranny of the country is visited and the breeding distribution mapped. A second survey covers the winter situation allowing overall population estimates to be made for each species.

During the 1988 to 1991 Atlas period, 12,000 pairs of curlews nested but, even then, there were signs that all was not well. The bird had disappeared from dozens of locations at which it had bred 20 years previously and few new sites had been colonised in the interim. Early indications of the numbers found in the current survey are even more depressing.

“We estimate that around 80% of the curlew breeding population has been lost since the 1970s alone and perhaps only a few hundred pairs remain,” says Dr Anita Donagby, the Appeal’s organiser.

That there has been a decline in curlews may surprise people living on the coast or close to wetlands. The bird is still a familiar sight. Its evocative cry and bubbling song accompany many a winter walk. The largest Irish wader is conspicuous on estuaries where it sinks its long downward-curving bill into the mud, rotating it so that the tip sweeps in a circle to catch shellfish and worms. The bill is flexible and sensitive, the avian equivalent of an elephant’s trunk. Females have longer bills; they probe deeper to avoid competing for food with the males. Curlews also visit rocky coasts, hunting crabs and small molluscs. When tides cover these feeding areas, birds move to grassy fields in search of earthworms and insect larvae. The ground remains soft during Irish winters, which suits curlews: there are large inland populations particularly in the West.

The birds seen in winter hail from Britain but Scandinavian, Baltic and Russian ones also turn up. The heather moorlands of Orkney support a thriving population but curlews haven’t colonised the Faeroes or Iceland. Are long sea crossings outside their comfort zone? We don’t know where Irish breeders spend the winter.

Curlew expert Ian Bainbridge, writing in The Migration Atlas, commented that “little is known of the wintering grounds of Irish breeding birds. We presume that they winter mainly in Ireland but there are no data to confirm this”. This creature of habit visits the same short stretch of estuary every winter. Reclamation, pollution or disturbance of such habitat could seriously affect our curlews.

The birds are equally site-faithful when it comes to nesting and return to the same patch of bog or wet grassland year after year. There has to be sufficient cover to hide the nest and plenty of invertebrates on which to feed the young. Curlews co-exist happily with cattle on rough, damp fields. The presence of livestock can be an asset. Grazing by cattle limits encroachment of furze and scrub. Such marginal farmland, unfortunately, is being destroyed through drainage, afforestation and neglect.

So how can we help our curlews? The bird is still on the shooting list. It’s unlikely that many are shot, but it seems perverse to hunt a species in trouble. Removing it from the list will have only a marginal effect but every little helps.

Another farmland bird, the corncrake, has similar problems but it breeds fairly successfully when its needs are taken into account in land management and farming practice. Similar measures should help the curlew.