Another summer goes by

This first appeared in the Heather Trust 2023 Annual Report

In Wensleydale, in mid-April, the silage fields are smooth and firm and the colour of bowling greens. To find Curlew nests, we sneak from one field to the next, launching ourselves over the dry stone walls to startle incubating birds, giving them no chance to scurry away from the nest before they rise. When the fields are empty we look like fools, but after an hour we have a couple of nests. The farmer is spreading slurry this morning; if the eggs are covered in slurry the nests will be abandoned. We mark the nests with canes and the farmer will take care not to damage them.

High on the moor, nests in the patchworks of rush, heather and grassland need a more patient approach: these birds seem to have more cunning, they are somehow wilder and more elusive. An hour becomes two; two becomes three; birds come and go; they prod and poke; the wind grows colder, harsher. Eventually a female sinks into a patch of short heather and the game is up.

In North Karelia, Finland, a few weeks later, what’s left of last year’s grass crunches underfoot. Great piles of snow lie next to the farm tracks. Ditches in neat rows slice through the flat brown fields. A crow trap sits next to a line of Norway Spruce. An agitated Curlew rises from the next field. Crests of incubating Lapwing poke out from the straw and tremble in the breeze.

A band stretches across Finland from Oulu in the West to North Karelia in the East where the winters are harsh enough to make life difficult for Foxes and other generalist predators, but the summers are warm and dry enough to make life good for farmers – and so in the enormous fields of hay meadow, fodder and cereals carved into the forests, the waders do well too. The late-lying snow and cold early spring give Lapwing and Curlew a fighting chance to get a brood away before fields can be mown, and climate change has given them an additional boost: the longer summer means Lapwing now have enough time to re-nest after early failure, and the population has boomed.

The waders don't just breed in farmland here: on the way out to the bogs, Hazel Grouse, Black Grouse and Capercaillie scatter from the side of forestry tracks or skulk into the Blaeberry and heather. Goldeneye and Green Sandpipers flush from forestry ditches. On the fringes of the bog, the sweet aroma of Labrador Tea and the sound of bubbling Black Grouse fill the air; Whinchat and Rustic Bunting whisper out songs from stunted, waterlogged pines. On the open ground, Lapwing wheel and dive, and Greenshank, Black-tailed Godwit and Whimbrel loop and reel to demarcate their territories. A pair of Whooper Swans light up a distant pool like a couple of discarded shopping bags. Curlew are here too, and these bog nesting birds are ever more inscrutable - they rise and alarm at the merest hint of an interloper. Eventually a female creeps away from a knoll a foot or two above the sodden marsh, and a clutch of four is revealed, but this is luck and little else.

Back in northern England, on a patchwork of burnt heather in the dead of night, a gamekeeper waits for hours in the freezing cold. When the vixen appears, he pauses, fixes her in the rifle scope and pulls the trigger. Nests are very unlikely to be lost to foxes here, and sure enough, young fledge from both of those nests in the silage fields: the farmer was careful too. She is passionate about her birds – she can talk for hours about Curlew - she can also talk for hours about the ever-changing web of financial incentives which confound and enmesh the livelihoods of hill farmers. Schemes that are devised to protect these birds, but which overlooks the intervention most likely to deliver results.

In other parts of Wensleydale, nests are being harvested and sent to aviaries to be released to fill the void in southern populations caused by foxes and other predators eating nests and chicks. On the other side of the M6 in the Lake District, a group of volunteers are assembling time and time again to deploy their electric fences to protect the last nests in their valley from foxes and badgers.

In summer, that farm in Finland is jam-packed full of Lapwing broods: mangy looking half-grown things grubbing at plowed fields in neat groups of four; one unremarkable field yields a count of thirty-one juveniles, while Curlew yap furiously from the longer grass. In these parts the farmers don’t like predators either - they want to hunt grouse in the forests in winter, but the farmers pay little mind to the waders; the birds are there and that’s that.

Those bog nesting birds in North Karelia will raise their broods in wild habitat subject to little human intervention in the company of bears, wolves and lynx, while those silage field birds in Wensleydale will rise ten times a day as the farmer goes about his work. There are as many ways of a Curlew fledging a brood as there are theories about what kind of interventions are appropriate and justified: theories about what line should be drawn where and by whom; about what is natural and unnatural; about what real Curlew habitat looks like, and if that should even matter. We toil and sweat more for this bird than any other: no other bird can boast such an army of celebrated devotees, nor so often peers out from the nature writing shelf at the bookshop, nor the cover of some album or other. Meanwhile, those doing the challenging work on the ground look on with a weary bemusement at a sector which appears content to studiously fiddle away at that which we can countenance, and equivocate over that which we cannot.