View From The Shed by Volunteer Shaun - ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

I really hope that you know what a Curlew looks like. Even moreso, I hope you know what one sounds like. There are fewer sounds in British nature more evocative than the bubbling, whooping call of a Curlew on a misty morning.

But now, sadly, there is one fewer Curlew species than there was when I was born. As regular readers will know, I use ‘my lifetime’ of almost sixty years a lot to measure the passage of time. I doubt that it will ever be an international standard of measurement but it’s an easy length of time to imagine and it also makes things more personal. It’s my lifetime but it could be yours or your parents’ if you’re younger. It’s not far off the span of a human lifetime. We can understand this length of time and relate to events that are this long.

And so, just half my lifetime ago it would have been possible to see nine species of Curlew if you had the time, money and inclination to travel all around the world. Now there are just seven. The Eskimo Curlew of Western Canada and Alaska has not been seen for over thirty years. Sadly it’s a pretty safe bet to say that the last one has already left the planet. More shockingly, in the last few weeks the Slender-Billed Curlew has been officially declared extinct. 

When Slender-Billed Curlews stopped turning up at their winter feeding grounds of Morocco it triggered a massive search throughout Southern Russia and Kazakhstan where they spend their summers. The quest continued along their migration route down through Italy. Sadly, not a single bird was found. The last confirmed sighting is now thought to be around thirty years ago. Hunting and agricultural intensification practices (as opposed to small family farms) are the most likely causes for their extinction.  They quietly disappeared, and we never noticed.

This is the 28th bird to be lost globally during my lifetime (there I go again with my personal time measurement), but perhaps more shockingly it’s the first bird from mainland Europe to be declared extinct since reliable records began, over 500 years ago. If we do nothing to stop climate change, pollution and human population growth it will probably soon be joined by others as one in five European species is now on the Red list, meaning that those birds’ chances of survival are classed as ‘critical’.

To the untrained eye (like mine) the Slender-Billed bird looked almost identical to our  own Common or Eurasian Curlew. This is the one that we get in Britain. Sometimes one or two will even occasionally drop in to one of our Dearne Valley reserves. They quite regularly fly overhead but prefer to feed on salty estuaries, moors or bogland to our freshwater wetland habitat.

I like to mention ancient British folklore names in these blogs about a particular species but in this case the name we currently use has remained pretty much unchanged for centuries. It’s one of our oldest recorded birds with a ‘Curlu’ being found in writings dating back to 1340. The names ‘Spowe’ and ‘Whaup’ have occasionally been locally used but the oldest label has been the one that has survived.

This is Europe’s largest wading bird and it’s primarily recognised by its huge beak which it uses for digging deep into mud and soil in search of small crustaceans or worms. The tip of the birds’ beak is incredibly sensitive and even slightly flexible, meaning that they can feel for their food rather than looking for it. 

As with so many bird species, changes in farming practices have meant that all Curlew species have had to adapt or their numbers will decline. The American Long-Billed Curlew is doing well. Our own European Curlew is not. Increased drainage of fields and reforestation of moorlands has had a calamitous effect on the Curlew population in the UK resulting in a decrease of over 50% in less than twenty years. Numbers in Northern Ireland have fallen to a critical level with only around 150 pairs of Curlew surviving there.

We were too late to save the Eskimo or Slender-Billed Curlews but is there anything that we can do to protect our own European species? Well, the RSPB has started monitoring some nest sites and even putting fencing around them to protect the chicks from predators. This has been met with initial success but obviously, these young birds need to find land to feed on if they are to survive. With that in mind we are managing thousands of hectares of farmland as part of our Curlew LIFE project to provide the exact environment that they need. Information on what farmers can do to help is freely available (see our webpage here) and the RSPB is encouraging them to do whatever they can, such as retaining rough, damp pasture and traditional hay meadows.

If you find yourself at the coast this winter, listen out for that ethereal, evocative call. I really hope that you get to hear it and, more importantly, that Curlews survive to carry on calling for generations (both theirs and ours) to come.