Nature Tripping Episode 27 - The Curlew
If you go up to Calderdale’s rough pasture and moorland during the spring and early summer you might encounter a variety of breeding birds – small ones like meadow pipits and skylarks and larger ones like oyster-catchers, golden plover, snipe and lapwings. There is perhaps none more distinctive though, both in its look and sound than the curlew – a large, elegant, brown wader with a very long curved beak and a strange, some say ghostly, bubbling song. Whilst numbers across Britain are going down and down, here in the South Pennines, we still experience their arrival every spring and seem to be holding on to our breeding curlew population. In this episode Cathy recounts her lifelong love for this iconic bird and discusses her British Trust for Ornithology survey work, sharing insights on local population levels and how we might conserve them. We also visit a nearby beauty spot (the Bridestones) and speak to local expert Andrew Cockcroft about a community-led initiative to buy the 114-acre site and restore its peat bog and acid grassland ecosystems for the benefit of wading birds as well as other wildlife, and people.
Photograph by Adrian Lee
Humans are making it difficult for Britain’s curlews. The way we choose to manage the land and the changes we are making to the climate mean it’s harder and harder for them to find the type of breeding habitat they need, find enough food to feed their chicks, cope with the weather, and avoid predation and disturbance.
Curlews start arriving on the South Pennine moors moors in early spring. They’ve spent the winter on the coast, poking about in the mudflats and the shoreline feeding mainly on invertebrates like marine worms, but also crabs and small molluscs. At high tide they roost (rest and sleep) in flocks on nearby fields or salt marshes. During winter months Morecambe Bay is a good place to see all this going on, especially as our own South Pennine population is joined by thousands of other curlews who’ve flown in from the rest of Northern England to spend their winter here too.
Come early spring everyone is starting to make a move back to their summer breeding grounds. Each will endeavour to incubate a clutch of 2-6 eggs laid in April or May, and keep its hatched brood fed and safe until they fledge about five weeks later. This is a precarious time and it’s estimated for every breeding pair of UK adults only 0.25 chicks are raised per season. If a young bird can make it to adulthood its annual survival rate is good, and it might live on average to be 11, although the oldest recorded curlew was 32.
Being waders, curlews like wet ground they can get their beaks into for food, and up on the moors and rough pasture they have a varied diet including insect larvae, flies, moths, worms, freshwater invertebrates, spiders, and even small animals like frogs and rodents. They also need enough mixed vegetation to hide in, especially from predators like foxes and carrion crows. Come late summer and into September adult and juvenile curlews migrate back to the coast for winter.
For more information:
British Trust for Ornithology (BTO): https://www.bto.org
Curlew Life: https://curlewlife.org
RSPB: https://www.rspb.org.uk
https://bridestones.love
An information sign on one of Calderdale’s footpaths