By the fifteenth century, public feasts had taken on monstrous proportions, and curlews were part of the steamed, roasted and boiled menagerie that were used to display social standing. This is an account of the feast for 2,500 people made to celebrate the enthronement of George Neville as Archbishop of York in 1465:
They consumed 4000 pigeons and 4000 crays, 2000 chickens, 204 cranes, 104 peacocks, 100 dozen quails, 400 swans, 400 herons, 113 oxen, 6 wild bulls, 608 pikes and bream, 12 porpoises and seals, 1000 sheep, 304 calves, 2000 pigs, 1000 capons, 400 plovers, 200 dozen of the birds called ‘rees’, 4000 mallards and teals, 204 kids, 204 bitterns, 200 pheasants, 500 partridges, 400 woodcocks, 100 curlews, 1000 egrets, over 500 stags, bucks and roes, 4000 cold and 1500 hot venison pies, 4000 dishes of jelly, 4000 baked tarts, 2000 hot custards with a proportionate quantity of bread, sugared delicacies and cakes. 300 tuns of ale were drunk, and 100 tuns of wine, a tun containing 252 gallons according to the usual reckoning.
According to The Booke of Goode Cookry Very Necessary for all such As Delight Therein (1584), the correct way to roast a curlew is to put its legs behind the body, cut off the wings and wind the neck so that the bill rests on the breast. Others suggest ‘letting the heads hang over the pot for show’.
In the seventeenth century, curlews baked in a pie, and also roasted, were served to King James I, and a few decades later, at the end of the century, they appear in a cookbook by Hannah Woolley, instructing servants in the correct terminology for ‘the curious art’ of carving different birds.
In cutting up small birds it is proper to say thigh them, as thigh that Woodcock, thigh that Pigeon: but as to others say, mince that Plover, wing that Quail, and wing that Partridge, allay that Pheasant, untach that Curlew, unjoint that Bittern, disfigure that Peacock, display that Crane, dismember that Heron, unbrace that Mallard, frust that Chicken, spoil that Hen, sawce that Capon, lift that Swan, reer that Goose, tire that Egg.
It is a testament to their former abundance that many a curlew will have come untached. In some areas, their eggs were also collected and served alongside the meat up until the middle of the twentieth century. Alas, that vision of a plethora of new moon birds gracing the land from the tip of Scotland to the moors of Cornwall, from Kerry to Norfolk, is a distant memory.
Over the last thirty years, numbers of curlews have declined on average by 20 per cent across the European continent, but that figure is misleading for the UK and Ireland, where losses are much higher. In their most western reaches in the Irish Republic there is nothing short of a disaster unfolding before our eyes. In the 1980s there were many thousands of pairs of nesting curlews, but today only around 120 remain. The official population for the UK is 66,000 breeding pairs, although my personal opinion is that this is optimistic and the real figure is much lower, maybe less than half that number. In Northern Ireland, for example, there has been a decline from 5,000 to 250 pairs since the 80s. The Welsh population has fallen by over 80 per cent and is now thought to be fewer than 400 breeding pairs. England and Scotland have lost around 60 per cent of breeding curlews in the last twenty years. So alarming are the figures that curlews were made a species of highest conservation concern in the UK in December 2015, and put onto the red list of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the worldwide union of conservation bodies that monitors the status of animals and plants throughout the globe. They are now in the same category as jaguars, ‘near threatened’, indicating that extinction is likely in the future.
The reasons for such dramatic declines across the board are many and varied. Farming methods, the spread of forestry, the drainage of uplands to create pasture for sheep and cows and predation of their eggs and chicks have all taken their toll, but despite the great losses not everyone has noticed they are disappearing. Curlews suffer from a problem specific to them: a distortion of our perception. The winter curlew population of 150,000, boosted by birds from Scandinavia and Finland, means that between September and February large congregations of curlews can be seen around the coast. The arrival of these continental birds gives the impression of curlew-abundance and that all is well. Come early spring, however, when the large flocks disperse, many fly back to northern Europe to breed, leaving our residents scattered increasingly thinly across Ireland and the UK.
There is no escaping the fact that curlews are failing to thrive and breed in the UK and Ireland. Year after year their numbers fall, and few of those that remain are managing to breed successfully in an increasingly hostile landscape. With precious few youngsters surviving to take the place of the older birds, the trajectory is resolutely downhill.
The transition of curlews to high conservation status in December 2015 was the trigger for me to follow them more closely. It was then that the idea of a 500-mile journey on foot began to crystallise and became a concrete plan. This would be no aimless wander but a pilgrimage, an inner and outer journey that has a goal. It would follow a definite line across the countries at the far western edge of the range of the Eurasian Curlew, a path that, as far as I could discern, was unique. Walking was by far the best way for me to track these increasingly elusive birds; it allows time to connect with the landscape and feel its character, something that cannot be achieved in a car. I would start in the early spring when birds were first arriving on their breeding grounds in the west of Ireland, then continue through the heart of Ireland to Dublin. I would then sail to Wales, arriving as incubation was well under way. After travelling through Wales I would arrive in England to coincide with the first hatching of chicks. Six weeks after setting out, I would finish on the East Anglian coast as the fledglings were beginning to try out their wings. Here I would mark the place where many curlews would come to spend the winter.
This would be a journey of many layers. A geographical one from west to east through the variety of landscapes that range across Ireland and the UK, places that are at once familiar and yet still mysterious. I wanted to see where the birds are surviving, but also experience their absence from the fields that no longer host their songs. It would be a walk through a year in the life of curlews. I would watch them displaying to their mates, soaring on fresh winds over fields just emerging from winter, and then I would search for their hidden nests in meadows and on moorland. If I was lucky, I would see their young, all feet and feathers and beady eyes. This would also be an artistic journey to explore the many connections that curlews have to poetry, literature, art and music, both in the past and today. But, most of all, I wanted to really understand what it is that is edging them closer to extinction, the environmental problems that are so huge that we are in real danger of losing them as a breeding bird across Ireland and the UK.
All this I decided at the start of 2016, when curlews were still on winter-cold estuaries and coasts. This is when they are easiest to see, gathered together for safety on mudflats, beaches or wet coastal grasslands. It would be a chance to think about the walk ahead, surrounded by the birds that mean so much to me. The nineteenth-century poet Helen Maria Williams wrote in her poem, ‘To the Curlew’:
Soothed by the murmurs of the sea-beat shore,
His dun-grey plumage floating to the gale,
The Curlew blends his melancholy wail,
With those hoarse sounds the rushing waters pour.
And so I started the year where the walk would end – on the east coast of England.
Chapter 2
The rain barely stopped falling throughout the winter that saw a wet 2015 turn into a soaking 2016. That December was the warmest and wettest ever recorded for the UK. By early January, large swathes of northern England were underwater. Thousands of people were soaked in misery, made worse by the filibustering of politicians. Further south and east, Norfolk was, thankfully, not so badly affected, but it was still drizzly and the ground sodden. This area is famous for its water. Once a giant wetland, it was drained in the seventeenth century to turn large swathes of it into more productive farmland. Now, ramrod rows of poplar and Leylandii puncture the horizon,