Disappearing moorland leaves curlews homeless

I listen for anything: the whooping chorus of swans on David’s lake or sheep shuffling through the rushes across in Connemara. If I cough there’ll be a bark from Ross, the farm collie down the hill.

One sound I’ve been listening hard for has always summoned up the west in just a couple of plaintive notes: cour-lee.

It reminds me of an inspired television commercial there was in the 1980s. It featured an expatriate engineer somewhere in the Middle East, sweating in a hard hat, and longing for Sally O’Brien and the way she might look at you, along with a glass of Harp and the curlew’s cry.

Now it seems the native curlew, Ireland’s iconic wader, is in danger of leaving home. Even the onset of another Arctic winter hasn’t conjured great numbers of them from Scotland and elsewhere in Europe.

BirdWatch Ireland reckons that well over 80 per cent of the Irish breeding population has been lost since the 1970s, falling from some 12,000 pairs to just a few hundred. Last summer Stormont took the bird off the hunters’ quarry list in Northern Ireland. Curlews in the Republic may still be shot this winter – an absurdity pointed up, in passing, in a Senate debate last month.

In practice, few self-respecting Irish shooters have aimed at a curlew in years, and Ireland’s open season is now shared only with France. A management plan for Europe’s curlew produced for the European Commission in 2007 blamed the widespread decline not on hunting (though the shooting in France “may have consequences for those segments of population that pass through”) but mainly on loss of breeding habitat and the loss of chicks to predators.

This is echoed by Birdwatch Ireland, which cites moorland vanishing under conifers, the bogs cut over, and marginal hill land drained and ploughed, or abandoned and covered with rushes and scrub.

Such wholesale loss of suitable upland habitat seems unlikely on the face of it. But in the lowlands drainage and intensive management of grassland have taken their toll on the bird’s nesting ground.

Even in the moist, unploughed native grasses of the Shannon callows, the curlew joins other native waders – lapwing, redshank and snipe – in severe decline. Their nests are swamped by mounting summer floods, and spreading scrub favours their predators.

Ground-nesting waders want open nesting habitats with clear views, and the nearest tree at least 100m away. In agreement with farmers, BirdWatch Ireland has been clearing scrub and using trial anti-predator fences at nesting time.

The Cry of the Curlew is BirdWatch’s current appeal for €99,000 for a programme to check the bird’s national losses. It will use this to find out where the last few hundred are breeding and then to improve or protect their habitats by clearing gorse and other scrub, blocking ditches to re-wet upland pastures, or looking for changes in grassland management. In Northern Ireland special action focuses on restoring wet grassland around Lough Neagh, a key area for curlew nesting.

Just now, of course, any chevron of curlews that flies my way, gliding down to the shore on arched wings, is most likely to have started out far to the east.

And while last week I was puzzling over the lack of migrant redwing and fieldfares on my hillside, the resurgence of the winter chill seems certain to bring great flocks of refugees.

At Ireland’s coasts the peregrine falcons are already poised to kill their share.

Among my windowsill bric-a-brac is the perfect skull and bill of a curlew, a delicate ivory sculpture picked up on an island off the mouth of Killary Harbour. The skull is no bigger than a pigeon’s egg, but the bill, with its flawless, fragile curve, is 13cm long. The tip is full of tiny perforations made to carry nerves that give the curlew its exquisite sense of touch.

When I found it years ago I wondered what had happened to the rest of the bird. Then I happened to read RM Lockley’s classic Letters from Skokholm (the title of which refers to an island off Pembrokeshire), in which one of his picnics was interrupted by a wild shriek from the sky: “Looking up, we were in time to see a peregrine strike a curlew at about one hundred feet above us. The curlew’s head was struck off close to the base of the skull, and fell beside us. The body fell into the sea, from which the peregrine made no attempt to retrieve it, but on seeing us flew away.”

Eye on nature

Queen wasps came into my house twice in early November. I assume they were trying to find a nice, comfortable place to spend the winter.

Catherine Organo, Blackrock, Co Dublin

They must have known more than we did about the harshness of the coming winter.

Before the snow I came across a giant beetle on its back on the roadside with its legs moving slowly. There were about 80-100 small, light orange/brown, egg-like things stuck to it.

Justin Doyle, Virginia, Co Cavan

This was a ground or burying beetle on which symbiotic, phoretic mites were hitching a lift to the next piece of carrion (dead mouse, say) in which the beetle was going to lay her eggs. Phoretic means hitching a lift. The mites then feed on the eggs of the blowflies that also use the carrion for egg laying, and so benefit the beetle. Amazing complexity of nature.

In riverside grass I discovered a fat frog in Kilkenny colours: amber/old gold with black spots. Is he rare?

Damien Maguire, Maynooth, Co Kildare

No. Frogs are variable in colour, and females are more brightly coloured.

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