Agriculture dominates Northern Ireland. Farms have been passed down through generations and land is integral to Irish identity. When farming was extensive, it was good for curlews and lots of other wildlife. When it changed from manual to mechanised, organic to chemical, hay to silage, it spelled disaster. Ground-nesting birds such as the corncrake and curlew were eradicated in large areas. Farming machinery destroys eggs and chicks indiscriminately. Faced with danger, curlew chicks will sink down into the grass and freeze, where they are killed instantly by the rotating blades. Nests full of eggs are flattened. Those birds that do manage to survive the machines will often fall prey to foxes and crows, two species that do well in intensive farmland.
The border county of Tyrone was once a curlew stronghold. Like County Antrim, this too was a land of rugged bogs and farms, but it underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1980s. Many of the peat bogs were stripped for turf and the floodplains of rivers such as the Blackwater were drained. The River Blackwater itself was dredged, deepened and widened, removing valuable wetland habitat for all kinds of wildlife. Some of the more marginal farmland was abandoned. Because curlews were once so numerous there, the RSPB set up a curlew recovery project, but sometime in the early 2000s they disappeared from the landscape and the project was abandoned. It took less than a generation to see curlews eradicated from a large area where they used to be common. Snipe, lapwing and redshank have all but gone, too. It was a stark example of how quickly birds can vanish. Now the only places that are safe for waders are where agriculture remains extensive or protected as nature reserves, such as cold, wet, upland Glenwherry and the islands in the middle of Lough Erne, County Fermanagh. The rest of Northern Ireland is now curlew-free. But even Glenwherry, which largely escaped the intensification of the lowlands, is under threat.
Neal and I sit in the car for a while in a layby to let the worst of a squall pass. Through the misting windows he points out the patchwork appearance of the view in front of us. Sections of bog are being turned into bright green rye grass fields or planted with conifers, both activities encouraged by subsidies. ‘We need to help farmers to keep some areas rough and unimproved for the curlews,’ he says. Keeping forestry at bay on land that is deemed unproductive in terms of farming is a big challenge. The Northern Ireland government has a target to increase tree cover by 50 per cent by 2056. Curlews, like many other ground-nesting birds, avoid nesting within 500 metres of the edge of forest, nervous of predators like foxes, badgers and crows. Far more land is therefore taken out of nesting habitat than just the area that is planted. Wind and solar farm applications are now commonplace in marginal land, bringing their own dangers for flying birds and disturbance on the ground. Glenwherry is currently considering proposals for a 250-acre solar farm, and wind farms can be seen all around the area. Slowly the upland bog is being transformed into a tamed, multi-use landscape. Somehow, in all of this complexity of human needs and endeavour, curlews must try to survive in their dwindling niche.
As the sleet tests the mettle of my new waterproof jacket, Neal and I wander along a puddle-strewn track between fields in the active Trial Management Project area, hoping to see a pair of curlews that had been spotted nearby. They have not long arrived back for the breeding season and their behaviour suggests they are staking out their territory and strengthening their pair bond, prior to laying eggs. Kerry Darbishire describes early-arriving curlews in her poem, ‘Messengers of Spring’:
In pairs they returned
from winter marsh like ghosts
to sink their new moon beaks
deep into turf soft as rain.
Mike Smart, an ornithologist friend who monitors curlews throughout the year in the west of England, describes their typical courtship behaviour when they first arrive on their territory:
They seem to adopt very characteristic behaviour; they are generally in twos, stalking round in a rather proprietorial sort of way, a little way apart, feeding quietly, and not getting very close together. Sometimes, however, they move quite close and start courtship display, in a moderate way, running around quite quickly together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes one ahead of the other, often picking up bits of grass or vegetation as they go, and throwing it down again; this can last for ten minutes. Occasionally, the male opens his wings slightly and does a couple of flaps, and seems to hold his tail up, rather like a Snipe. Sometimes the male displays by swooping and calling to a female on the ground and then they carry on feeding together in the surrounding grasslands.
Under normal circumstances, there would be many pairs of curlews with males sometimes fighting each other to define the edges of their territory. In March and April, uplands like Glenwherry should come alive with the sounds of calling curlews. In his book, Waders, their Breeding, Haunts and Watchers, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson describes how, ‘On a still morning, the moor soon rings with the marvellous bubbling songs and the air dances of different cocks.’5 Males and females would dance and sing to each other, chasing around and seeing off intruders from dawn to dusk. Angry males would rip up grass and throw it about, displaying their white undersides, psychologically bullying any male that tried to muscle in. Sometimes clashes would involve exchanging blows with their wings, but rarely with their delicate and easily damaged bills. Eventually, hierarchy and territories would be established, and nests would be built at least 100 metres apart, often more. The birds would be spread over the landscape, the best areas taken by the dominant pairs. But there is no such vying for territory today, and these cannot be described as normal circumstances. Neal and I have to search for quite a while to find even a single pair. The air is not full of wonderful bubbling and trilling; it is largely silent.
I envy Neal his wellies in this waterlogged world. ‘Stick your boots in the turf of this island and they fill up with the bog water,’ wrote blogger Alen McFadzean about walking the hills of Antrim. Maybe he had been along this footpath, too. Suddenly, out of the silence, comes a fluty call – half mournful, half laughing. In the distance, a curlew and its mate fly low and land further away from us. They had spied us and we had spooked them. I am amazed we can provoke this reaction from such a distance, but curlews are always nervous, and in this seemingly empty landscape we stand out. But this is proof they have made it back again, this pair and a few others we hear over the course of the morning, pouring intermittent music over a bleak, frozen moor. Ted Hughes heard curlews on a winter’s morning, carving sound out of frosty air. ‘I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge/The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.’6
No one knows for sure if curlews re-pair with the same partner each year, but it’s generally believed that they do. Through binoculars, I can just make them out as they land in rushes and creep away like soldiers in combat. Brown birds in a brown field – a tantalising glimpse of life that melts into the bog all too soon. Northern Ireland seems to be full of things half-seen. Religion and myth intertwine here. The ghosts of ancient kings, fairies and giants hang like mists over the land, and the remnants of the havoc they caused by their battles and magical spells are the boulders, loughs, depressions, cliffs and mountains. That potent symbol of Ulster, the Red Hand, is founded on a boat race over the sea where mythical kings raced each other to the shore. Whoever touched the land first could proclaim ownership. One king was so desperate to win he cut off his own hand and threw it onto the beach, declaring his sovereignty with blood.
It seems almost every feature of the landscape tells a fantastical tale of good and evil or love and hate. Large glacial boulders are the stones