A tune about the curlew? It would have to be a lament

ANOTHER LIFE'BELIEVE IT OR NOT, we heard a curlew last week, here at Cnoc Suain – a rare sound these days."

The e-mail from a friend took on a special resonance. Cnoc Suain is an award-winning holiday retreat, a remarkable clachan high on unspoilt moorland above Spiddal, in Connemara. It offers language, culture, music and natural history of the Gaeltacht, and my friend Charlie Troy, geologist and teacher, did much to create it. But if his partner, Dearbhaill Standún, native of Spiddal and well versed in its folk culture, were to reach for a tune about the cuirliún, it would have to be a lament.

In the newscaster’s equally soulful cliche, I am “coming to terms” with the catastrophic rate of decline of Ireland’s iconic wader.

Indeed, when BirdWatch Ireland reported finding only four breeding pairs in Co Mayo last spring and another four in Co Donegal – this at 60 locations that previously held curlews – I was incredulous. (So, for that matter, were the researchers.)

I hold on to an image of them, a little flock gathered in late summer at the far corner of the strand and then sifting up on to the fields as I approached, their cries a soft descant of protest. But that must be a decade ago. A century past, the return migration in March to breed in the uplands brought piercing cries for hours to the night skies over towns. (The lights, it seems, drew the curlews lower.)

As late as the 1970s, the native population was still put at some 12,000 pairs.

A national survey now under way may change the picture, but the collapse of this native bird to, at most, a few hundred breeding pairs seems all too likely.

What could have caused it? BirdWatch Ireland’s senior conservation officer Dr Anita Donaghy, switching her focus from saving the corncrake, finds the main causes of decline in loss of breeding habitat – this is certainly the picture elsewhere in Europe. She cites moorland vanishing under conifers, bogs cut over by machine, and marginal hill land drained and ploughed or abandoned and covered with rushes and scrub. From her base at Letterkenny, Co Donegal, and with money from BirdWatch’s Cry of the Curlew appeal, she directs operations to restore the most promising upland sites, clearing scrub and blocking ditches to rewet upland pastures.

BirdWatch has also hired a Donegal shooter to cull local numbers of foxes and crows, the principal predators of ground-nesting birds.

Their toll on curlews may well have increased as curlews are concentrated by changing land use into smaller and smaller upland areas. Some early research into their decline, on Northern Ireland’s marginal farmlands and lake islands in the 1990s, also added mink to the list of villains.

In Donegal an “animal rights” release of 5,000 mink from a fur farm certainly can’t have helped. But while mink, hooded crows and foxes are predators we’re all free to shoot, other upland birds we admire, approve of and protect are equally part of the natural web of predation.

Ravens, a protected species and widely supposed less rapacious than hooded crows, were reckoned “more than just casual egg-eaters” in some upland areas studied by the UK’s late and celebrated Derek Ratcliffe. Hen harriers, too, have been indicted, notably on Orkney, for frequently taking young curlews. There, even hungry sheep dogs have shared in the blame.

Ireland’s raven population has certainly increased, boosted first by the rising sheep population and its winter carrion on overgrazed hills. Then came the move to end the use in the lambing season of poisoned bait – the sort that has killed some of Kerry’s new sea eagles. In the UK, the raven population more than doubled from 1994 to 2007, but this is seen as a welcome recovery from a low of historic persecution by farmers and gamekeepers.

The suspicion that ravens might be responsible for wader declines, that of curlews among them, has been shared by some UK conservationists. This prompted a study by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, funded by Scottish Natural Heritage. Reporting early this year, it found “weak associations between increases in ravens and declines in lapwing and curlew” that could have resulted by chance. Things may be different in western Ireland, and we could need our own research, but do we want to start shooting ravens, one of my own favourite, intelligent birds? The idea of a “balance of nature”, promising some stability in the affairs of the natural world, has been around since Aristotle. But it can now seem largely undone by science, given so many interacting species and the constant flux of environmental change. Adding to the problem, people not only manipulate the landscape, prompted by random economic events, but also introduce an irrational, inconsistent variable, admiring some predators and outlawing others.

How many foxes and ravens are too many; how many curlews too few? In the balance of nature we now call biodiversity, we must try to keep them all.

Eye on nature

In August I saw a young seal wrestling with an octopus at Keem Bay, on Achill. This went on for more than an hour. Then, sadly, the seal ingested the animal, which killed the seal by lodging in its throat.

Siobhán Herbert, Dublin

I made some interesting observations in my back garden recently: a flock of about 14 juvenile goldfinches gorging themselves on silver-birch seed; a male blackcap eating cotoneaster berries (I thought they were exclusively insect-eaters); and a single wren, the first I’ve seen in 2011. I thought the severe winter had killed them all.

John McCorry, Portadown, Co Down

Blackcaps eat insects in summer and berries in winter.

I keep aviaries with mostly parakeets. Over the past three months I have had a robin take residence in one aviary. I have caught him with difficulty on two occasions, and freed him, to have him return within a day or two. He has now been joined by another, and they get on quite well in a confined space. The original one is quite tame and shows no fear when I am cleaning or feeding.

Derek Pullen, Bray, Co Wicklow

Clever robins have found a good B&B for the winter.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address