My Birds

It's a long drive to the site now; I’ve visited every spring since the forestry fence went up, and I won’t stop until the Curlew are gone. I've always wanted to find a nest on top of one of the forestry mounds where the saplings died, but I never have. At the edge of the site the ground falls away, and beyond the deer fence is where the broadleaved trees are planted on the steep slope above the burn. There are piles of tree guards on the slope. Some have slipped down into the water and are snagged on rocks. None are fixed to the nibbled whips. The access gate is some distance away, so it would have been quite a walk for a forester to go back out of the site along the fence-line and fix the tree guards to the whips correctly. Foresters are busy people in Scotland at the moment, perhaps they were late for their next appointment.

Back in the main site, the small rectangular pools formed in the upended peat below the mounds where the dead pine trees are slumped would have made good feeding for Lapwing chicks for a year or two if they could avoid falling in and drowning. The vegetation will be getting too long for the Lapwing now, but they will pop up somewhere else, there are still lots of suitable fields down the glen.

A friend of mine who farms and is involved in Curlew conservation often talks about his birds: how he did everything he could for them; the long cold nights shooting foxes only for another to come to fill the void with no end in sight; the never-ending struggle against the Sitka that now surrounds his farm. When I hear this I'm conscious of my own itinerancy - that I go from place to place, country to country, work on one project and then another project. I think of all the sites I've surveyed under one guise or another never to return. And what's more, all I do is document decline: document absences where once there were birds; set cameras to record wader nests being eaten, but all the while never doing much about it. I once spent two weeks in Northern Ireland visiting twenty-five or so sites where waders had been recorded on a previous survey thirty years earlier. The sum of two weeks effort was one moribund-looking Lapwing - that was the only wader I saw, aside from a few small flocks of failed breeders on the shores of Lough Neagh.

When the forestry comes to these places with it's enormous grants, we replace Curlew with Willow Warblers; then Willow Warblers become Coal Tits as the forest matures; then the plantation is felled and Coal Tits become Dunnocks and Wrens. What does any of that matter anyway? Birds are oblivious to our Red and Amber Lists, our priorities and action plans, they have no awareness of the plight of their species, nor their own rarity or commonness. Yet I keep coming: I am here once more because these Curlew remind me of places I don’t visit anymore, and people I don’t see anymore. As soon as I saw the glossy trucks arrive to start putting up the fences, I knew that these birds would fade away to the next species, and that species would fade away to the next. But perhaps, just for a moment or two, these were my birds.