GWCT News Blog

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.

The Daily Telegraph recently reported that the RSPB is seeking contractors to undertake predation management as part of their efforts to protect curlews in Northern Ireland.

After two consecutive years of intensive curlew nest monitoring in the New Forest, it’s now clear that foxes pose the greatest threat to curlew nest survival in our study area. Of the 41 curlew nests monitored with cameras in 2021 and 2022, 25 failed due to predation, and 17 of these were attributed to foxes.

Curlew breeding and wintering numbers are declining in Hampshire and periodic surveys of breeding waders in the New Forest suggest that the curlew population probably peaked in the 1980s at about 120 pairs, but has since declined to about 45 pairs. 

If we want to stop the curlew going the way of many other birds, such as the corncrake and the nightjar, we are going to need Defra to allow landowners to resume protecting the curlew’s young on their most important breeding grounds.