is stirring in the February air; the approaching spring seems to be awakening their instincts.
Despite the cold, short days, winter is coming to an end. The world is on the cusp of change. Birdsong becomes louder and more musical, more earnest. Buds bulge and green shoots have more vigour. The curlews feel it. Their migration to their summer grounds is about to begin. It will be a staged journey, not a direct flight. Very soon this group in Wensleydale will split up and head to the same breeding grounds they have always gone to. These are birds of routine and faithfulness. They will stop for a few days in the same fields, in fact the same spot in the same fields, calling and displaying, searching each other out, always heading closer to their final nesting place.
Most of the Wensleydale curlews might not have far to go. It is likely they spread out over the surrounding moors and upland farms. Others, though, could travel hundreds of miles. Previous studies suggest some birds may head to Teesdale before heading out to Scandinavia. This new ringing project will help fill in some of the gaps, and I left Tom with plans to return when the birds are nesting and the valleys and moors are burgeoning with life. I drove back to Bristol with a mind full of wintery new moon birds singing in a grey, flooded field.
As the seasons shift, so too do the winds around the Earth and the currents in the sea. Movements in air and water bring a fresh energy to a winter-weary world. That energy can bring new life and new generations – but it can also be lethal. Gales, fog, heavy rain and storms can hit just when the birds are on the wing.
On an unusually foggy, cold night, on 9 March 1911, there was ‘a tremendous night of Curlew cries over Dublin’.2 Thousands of birds of different species – including curlews, thrushes, starlings, robins and skylarks – were ‘streaming over the south and east coasts of Ireland, heading north. They were exhausted and disorientated.’ One man near Waterford recorded, ‘The whole bird creation was astir and the people of the town were kept awake by the shriek of the Curlew, Duck and Snipe hovering over the town.’ A ship’s captain reported ‘millions of birds’ alighting on his ship. ‘Amongst them was a number of curlews.’ Lighthouse keepers told of birds crying and wheeling around the lanterns in the dead of night. A certain Mr Fanning was awoken from his sleep and wrote, ‘Curlew were heard calling continuously over the town of Lismore … the air was full of them. The nights were dark and foggy, and the birds kept hovering over towns where gas-lamps were lighted.’ And in Carlow, ‘the sky was almost obscured by vast numbers of Curlew and Starling … The streets were practically littered in the morning with the bodies of dead birds.’ Another report describes a man out walking at midnight and finding curlews, ‘walking up and down the flat bank at the side of the river, screaming piteously.’ It must have been a tragic and disturbing sight.
Returning to their breeding grounds from wintering in southern Europe, these poor creatures seem to have been caught out by extreme and unusual weather. Having been held back for longer than normal by intense cold across the continent, the temperature across France suddenly rose, accompanied by a change in wind direction. The birds took their chance and left en masse, but what the birds didn’t know was that Britain and Ireland were still in the grip of a deep freeze. As warm continental air hit the cold air over the North Sea, a bank of fog extended 30 miles from the coast and conditions were made worse by a waning moon, providing very little light. Cold, exhausted and disorientated, the birds made for any light source they could find, hence their landing on ships and lighthouses. Thousands died.
Bad weather during migration is not uncommon, but extreme events like this are, thankfully, rare. However, migration is always dangerous. Hunting and lack of food at stop-over sites make a hazardous journey far worse. Yet, still, the urge to fly to far away lands full of insects and good nesting areas is strong; it is an instinct that is impossible to resist.
The shift from winter to early spring was making me restless, too. The date set for the start of my long walk, 21 April, was just a few weeks away. It was time to plan my own, hopefully far less perilous, journey to Ireland.
Chapter 3
On a day when the curlew returns,
Its cry circling the moor,
Suddenly, to the man
In love with time, the whole land
Is the poem he will never write,
Birth cry, love song, threnody
Woven in voices of the living
And voices of the dead.1
I travelled to Ireland on 17 April, a few days earlier than the start date of my walk, for two reasons. I wanted to visit County Antrim to see an RSPB project working to restore curlews to the uplands, which now host just a remnant population. The other reason was personal. I spent many childhood holidays in Northern Ireland, as my mother was born into a large Catholic family in Enniskillen. Her death in April 2015, just a year before, gave the start of the walk added poignancy. I would begin my odyssey in a place she had loved, and I wanted time to say goodbye.
My mother lived in England all her married life. As the only one of six siblings to leave Ireland, she held tight to her roots. The religious division and social injustice that blighted the lives of so many in Northern Ireland erupted into thirty years of war in The Troubles. On frequent visits during the 1970s and 80s, it seemed that every street corner was festooned with either the Union Jack or the Irish tricolour, flapping defiantly in the rain-soaked wind. My mother had a life-long loathing of national flags. To her unending credit, even in the darkest days of The Troubles, she never tolerated any taking of sides. She was steadfast in her view that evil was evil no matter who perpetrated it, even though those years of horror profoundly affected her own family. She understood what drove people to extremes. She recognised the inner strength of the ‘ordinary’ people of Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, and the rich cultures that shaped their experiences.
For my own part, life with a fiery Irish Catholic mother and a quiet, intellectual father, a Church of England doctor whose soul was rooted in the hard work and grit of the industrial Midlands, made for an interesting background to family life. My mother’s Irish-Catholic view of the world, full of compassion and ritual, complexity and contradiction, merged with my father’s gentle, measured Anglican stance. It was an unusual combination. And then, strangely, curlews appear in the middle of it all. As is often the case, separate strands of life can suddenly and unexpectedly weave together. Grief for my mother and hope for the future of a bird gave an emotional depth to the start of the New Moon Walk.
It is a cold, still dawn as the ferry draws closer to Belfast. Over one thousand years earlier, an Anglo-Saxon seafarer had written a poem about the hazards of crossing northern seas in an open boat. Storms swept over the deck, sleet and snow chilled his bones, and his ship:
Hung about with icicles,
Hail flew in showers.
There I heard nothing
but the roaring sea,
the ice cold wave.2
The prosaic truth about my crossing, however, is that my Liverpool to Belfast sailing was more
