2024

To mark World Curlew Day we'd like to share ‘Call of the Moors', a poem written by Nigel Algar Orde-Powlett, later 6th Baron Bolton, when he was a teenager. It was published in 1918 and he wrote it after his older brother 2nd Lieutenant William Percy Orde-Powlett was killed in action during World War One

As part of his final studies at The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Nico Venables has built a marionette puppet of a Curlew which he believes is the first of this puppetry style.

There are few more iconic sights than a curlew in flight, but without intervention it could be something future generations will never get to enjoy. The curlew with its distinctive haunting call, is now one of our most rapidly declining breeding bird species in the UK...

As I write this the first curlew are returning to their breeding grounds in the UK. We welcome around 25% of the world’s breeding population each spring but without urgent intervention, this beautiful bird may soon become nothing more than a memory.