We see five curlews in all on Muckinish, displaying and calling. They have flown in from farms on the mainland where they have been feeding and roosting overnight. The softer soils of the mainland have worms and insects that can be extracted more easily than tackling the thin shingle covering the islands. But the birds can’t nest on the farms. Danger lies in every direction; too many grass-cutting machines, trampling hooves, people with dogs and hungry predators. We survey the fertilised, emerald grassy squares from the rough shoreline of the island. Sheep graze peacefully. ‘It shows how important a mixed countryside is,’ says Brad. ‘Curlews don’t just need safe nesting areas in long grass, they have to be able to feed in shorter vegetation when they have chicks. And in the winter, they go to the coast and mudflats. To protect curlews we have to think big.’ The curlew is a bird that spreads its wings. It flies over the whole country. It needs land that is wet and dry, green and brown, long grass and short, mud and marsh, high ground and lowland. Curlews live in the whole landscape, not just in one place. It is a bird that binds together many different places, and to look after them we must consider everywhere from the coast to the mountains. The work under way on the islands of Lough Erne is just one piece of a very large jigsaw.
When Brad arrived to take up the job in 1997, waders of all species were declining rapidly. In 1998 the area that is now the reserve had sixty pairs of curlews. By 2009 that had declined further to thirty-four pairs. Even those that did breed only occasionally managed to fledge chicks. In the worst case, on one large island, fledglings survived in only two out of fourteen years. ‘Curlews were in a really desperate situation,’ says Brad. ‘Like corncrakes, they did very well in hay meadows that were cut late, it gave the birds a chance to raise their young before the grass was cut. Given the changing weather we have these days, it isn’t a surprise people cut for silage as often as they can, but early cutting isn’t compatible with ground-nesting birds.’ The silage machines did for the curlews in the mainland fields, but even on the islands, where they should have been safe, numbers continued to fall. Many of the islands had been farmed for generations, but things were changing. In some places farming had been all but abandoned and the land scrubbed over. Water levels of the lake were artificially varied, affecting the foreshore where many birds nested. Forests were planted, providing perfect lookouts for predators like hooded crows. Foxes are good swimmers and increasing numbers on the mainland meant they were becoming more of a problem offshore. Slowly but surely even these island havens of tranquillity were becoming less suitable for ground-nesting birds.
From the late 1990s onwards, small-scale targeted management on the RSPB reserve started to turn things around. Continued removal of trees, scrub and predators and improved grazing management meant that by 2014 the curlew population had increased to forty-seven pairs. Two-thirds of their nests hatched young. And it was not just the curlew that benefited; all of the wader populations responded. From the low point of 104 pairs of waders in 2000, there was an increase to 219 pairs in 2014. ‘We have demonstrated that curlews will respond to management,’ says Brad. ‘The next step is to roll this out into the wider countryside.’ It is a big ask. Everything about the direction of travel is away from making land wildlife-friendly and more towards using every inch of it to make money. Curlew, snipe, redshank, lapwing and oystercatchers are not money-spinners, and though they are well liked and part of our culture and heritage, they are not a priority.
None of this habitat management comes cheap. Electric fencing is expensive and keeping the island curlew-friendly requires strategic planning, physical work, and liaison and negotiation with local communities. Curlews not only have to pay their way on farmland through subsidies, they also have to rely on the donations received by charities to survive in nature reserves. You could say that curlews everywhere have to sing for their supper in a world where money rules. It seems there is no place for them just to be. The Antrim and Fermanagh new moon birds are lucky to have the spending power of the RSPB behind them.
We sit in the canoe and chat for a while about the future of Northern Ireland’s curlews. Antrim and Fermanagh hold well over 90 per cent of the Northern Ireland population. Both Brad Robson and Neal Warnock know that without the cooperation of farmers, and the general public giving to wildlife charities, it will be very difficult to reverse the downward trend seen throughout Europe, and most especially in Ireland. There is some hope to be derived from the fact that the people of the North are still closely connected to the land. There is a blurring of lines between town and country, with many people still having strong links to a farming way of life, either directly or through close relatives. And this is a small country where the rural and urban sit closely together; where farmers’ fields end by the garden fence.
Tapping into this public connection with the environment, and the Irish love of all things lyrical, in 2010 the RSPB asked the Northern Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney, to write the foreword to the conservation plan for Lough Beg, the place where he grew up in County Antrim. The un-poetically named Lough Beg Management Plan was thus given poetry through Heaney’s appeal to reconnect with what he called ‘the country of the mind’, the place where memory and feeling come to life through the past. The names and places highlighted in the Management Plan, he said:
‘… belong first and foremost in memory and imagination. They evoke a dream land that was once the real land, a shore at evening, quiet water, wind in the grass, the calls of birds, maybe a man or woman out in a back field just standing looking, counting cattle, listening. The Lough Beg Management Plan intends to make that country of the mind a reality once again. It wants to bring back a landscape where the peewit and the curlew and the whirring snipe are as common as they used to be on those 1940s evenings when I’d go with my father to check on our cattle on the strand.’2
This very human appeal to emotion and memory engages people on a different level to the language of science, strategy and directive. Inviting Heaney’s contribution was a stroke of genius. A ‘country of the mind’, beautifully drawn out in the poet’s gentle phrases, is a place we hold dear, where past landscapes energise our plans for the future. Perhaps all conservation literature should be written by poets, employing the power of meaningful words to galvanise the hearts and minds of a wide range of people. Mario Cuomo, the American Democratic politician, famously believed, ‘You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.’
In many ways, the span of Seamus Heaney’s life (1939–2013) captured the dramatic changes that engulfed Northern Ireland. His poetry in Death of a Naturalist conveys the quiet, rural simplicity of his childhood, when lighting was by gas lamps and turf was cut by hand. His final words, sent to his wife by text message just minutes before he died, were ‘Noli timere’, Latin for ‘do not be afraid’. Huge changes and an uncertain future were about to engulf his family, and from his mobile phone he used an ancient language and a phrase found frequently in the Bible to comfort them. He was born into a time when life was slow and rooted in the soil, he died when his beloved country was brightly lit and mechanised, with high-speed communications moving fast through the ether. Heaney embraced the old and the new, but he never lost his great love of the visceral, beautiful land of his childhood.
The night before I set off, 20 April, is clear. I stand outside my bed and breakfast and look up at the sky; a full moon hangs peacefully in the blackness. Is this a good omen? A full moon has ancient associations with lunacy, from the Latin luna, for moon. This silver disc was thought to exercise a powerful influence over our emotions, tugging them as it does the waters of the seas. Lunatics were thus at the mercy of the waxing and waning of the moon. Standing in the cool breeze on this calm, starry night, I can’t help but think that the task ahead is in many ways a lunatic scheme. The journey feels enormous, and nothing feels solid. I have never met most of the people I will be staying with; the only contact we have had so far has been on social media. Nor have I ever travelled down most of the roads I have marked out on my maps. In my mind they appear as insubstantial as threads of cotton, snaking their way towards an unknown horizon. Five hundred miles of twisting roads – a lunatic walk for a new moon bird.
The following morning dawns bright and