Save the curlew!
Unlike last year, when drought caused many curlews in the Durham dales to delay breeding, this has been a great spring for them. Last week, wherever I walked, anxious curlew parents were whinnying above me like aerial ponies. At one point I stepped carefully aside as a day-old chick, clumsy on its oversized blue legs, tried to hide in the cotton grass. The Pennines, North York moors and eastern Scotland are the world stronghold of the curlew, or ‘whaup’, a bird whose bubbling aria fills the sky over these moors in spring so fully that you cannot find a one-minute gap of silence between their songs in a typical April dawn (I’ve tried).
