Curlews are crying out for help

AFTER the constant blue skies and dry days of recent months, I had forgotten what the view looked like in rain.

Emerging from indoors one evening last week, I was staggered to see the world transformed, yet familiar, like a ghost come back.

I’d been in the pub for an hour — Friday evening’s ritual drink and catch-up with the news — but that wasn’t the cause of the staggering. It was that all had changed utterly, as the poet said, and another kind of beauty was born.

I’d entered the premises on a golden evening; now, all was grey, the lights around the bay blurred and hazy, marking the houses I knew were there but couldn’t see. The channel buoys blinked green and red, afloat in darkness, and the village was the old familiar, ghostly place where time could be turned back a half a century, even as far back as childhood memory when few lights glowed and the world was all a mystery, come rain or shine.

I hadn’t been brought up in the village anyway, although I’d spent my early childhood in a town on the same coast, with the same autumn and winter mists — but I suppose that for all children, lights glowing in the darkness, with or without mist, conjure up the mysterious, the magical or the sinister.

It is one of great bonuses of childhood that we haven’t yet named the world around us, and what we see feeds our imagination and nurtures our souls. We don’t know that the glowing orb across the bay is only the milking shed alongside Mick Finn’s farm, that the aura over a light at sea is not the halo on the head of Stella Maris. We are free of history, and our imagination can roam.

It was, indeed, a dramatic change that I witnessed; it was the first rain for many weeks and not even rain, but better, what Austin Clark described as “the mist becoming rain.” I walked home in just 10 minutes, and the freshness of the journey was as pleasurable as a sun-bath. Total silence enclosed me, the rain still so light that it fell soundlessly. I strode along in a sort of vapour bubble, watching out for the few lamp posts because one could hardly see farther than one’s hand.

When I arrived home, I was damp, not wet. I’d stepped out earlier into one world and returned in another. The garden was green with steam rising from it, a different garden altogether, and the gravel on the driveway shone.

The weather cleared but soon mist replaced sunlight and while the farmers basked at the Ploughing Championships in Laois, for four days here we didn’t see the other side of the bay. Out on the cliffs, the view toward America was foreshortened and, eastward, no sign of the Old Head of Kinsale. How extraordinary that 10 days before, walking on the Sheep’s Head, I was reporting islands of light on the sea so bright that we could believe heaven was drifting a mile offshore. What a fine country we live in, if only we could learn to manage it and save ourselves grief.

The winter migrants come here, in spite of austerity. Of course, they have no rent or air fares to pay. I watched curlews the other afternoon, probably migrants, travelling in a bunch. However, next day, I spotted a solitary bird and wondered if it was one of our increasingly rare natives. Irish-hatched curlews will shortly be a distant memory like the Bonnán Buí, the bittern, and the curlew’s lonely notes will be heard only in winter when migrants come. The curlew’s call is one of the most evocative of all Irish sounds, echoed in uileann pipes and fiddles and tin whistles, echoed in every instrument that makes our unique music. The plaintive and bubbling notes ring out and somehow hold our history in them, and the clear air of the uplands in summer, our heritage.

On the ‘Cry of the Curlew Appeal’ page of BirdWatch Ireland’s website, one can hear recordings of their call by clicking a button. They are a joy. But 80% of the breeding population has been lost since the 1970s; only a few hundred pair remain. Funding is needed for research and restoration of breeding sites. Hear the cry, and make a donation today.