Mary Colwell, a producer at the BBC natural history unit, is on a mission: to save the British curlew from extinction. Yet there is a key moment in this readable, highly informed and heartfelt book, when its author shows you the scale of her challenge. It is at the beginning of her 500-mile trek across Ireland, Wales and England to raise the flag for the totem bird.
She goes to a school in Ballinamore in the heart of rural Ireland — where curlews would once have been abundant — and is asked to address a classroom of 17- to 18-year-olds. The pupils are taking their final exams in agriculture and the environment. Yet not one of them has even heard of a curlew, let alone seen one or listened to its heart-piercing spring vocalisations. These are the future farmers of Ireland. How can they possibly care, or do something for, a species of which they know absolutely nothing?
It is now only people of a certain age who can recall occasions 40 years ago when Europe’s largest wading bird was a daily part of our lives. Then the bird was ubiquitous on British coasts in winter, where they were once hunted for the pot. Even a generation ago curlews were celebrated as a fixture of the farmed landscape, especially in the uplands. Not now.
The ‘official’ UK population is 66,000 pairs, but Colwell believes that less than half this number remains. Across Europe curlew numbers have also fallen in recent decades and the bird is threatened with global extinction. All this is shocking; but it is the picture in certain former strongholds that is most troubling. In Ireland, the bird is down 95 per cent, with just 130 pairs remaining of the many thousands that once bred there.
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