World Curlew Day: do we really need it?

The environmental calendar is peppered with special days, days dedicated to species, habitats, even whole ecosystems. Do we really need another day? Shouldn’t we just be celebrating all species, all of the time? Can having a date in the calendar really help a bird that has no idea what ‘World Curlew Day’ means? You can probably tell from the fact that it continues beyond the first paragraph, that in my opinion yes, I it can help them. My older brother had a handwritten note that he had pinned to his cork board saying “something that can be done at any time is never done at all”. It rings true for so many parts of life, including celebrating our wildlife, having special days to celebrate species like the curlew helps to prevent those celebrations from continuously slipping down the to do list to make way for the hum drum of daily life admin. They help to focus our attention, to bring communities and stakeholders together, and to remind us that there is stuff out there worth fighting for.

UKY4N and curlews: what’s the link?

Alongside my role at UK Youth for Nature, I am General Manager of a small charity called Curlew Action, an organisation working to reverse the decline of Curlews and promote wider natural history education. Curlew Action and UKY4N have partnered on several campaigns including Natural Kingdom: Wild Walls and Lines in the Sand.

I’ve worked in curlew conservation for two and a half years now and it is humbling to see the lengths that people will go to protect these birds. For each person, the call of a curlew means something different, for some, they are a meadow or moorland bird, heralding spring with their bubbling calls. For others, haunting curlew cries drift over mudflats and flooded fields, serenading listeners clutching hot flasks of tea in the winter cold. For still others, they are a memory of a childhood wilderness that has fallen silent. World Curlew Day is a day to bring us all together, everyone who has had their soul touched by the eerily beautiful cry of the curlew.

Photo by Tim Melling. Photo by Dirk Perry.

How did it all start?

Mary Colwell, Founder and Director of Curlew Action, started World Curlew Day in 2017 to help draw attention to the threats faced by curlew species around the world. Here in the UK, the Eurasian curlew has declined by 50% in my 25 year lifetime. A combination of high levels of predation, intensive farming and loss of nesting habitat has pushed these once numerous and widespread songsters to one of the most pressing conservation priority species in the UK. The wonderfully named Bristle-thighed curlew, so called because of the long bristle-like feathers on its lower belly, is facing invasive rats that we introduced to their once safe Hawaiian island home. The Far-Eastern curlew is losing vital habitat to coastal development across the Australasian Flyway. The Numenius family is declining across the world. The curlews are telling us that all is not well across our landscapes, if we ignore the urgent message woven into their piping cries, we will lose them, and with them great swathes of the wildlife that they live alongside.

Eurasian curlew by Andy Greggory

Bristle-thighed curlew by Merry Miller

Far-Eastern curlew by unknown

Why today?

The 21st of April is the day that Mary started her 500 mile walk across the UK to find out what is happening to curlews, it is the average egg laying day for Eurasian curlews, it also happens to be the feast day of the patron saint of curlews, St Bueno. There really could be no other day for World Curlew Day. Today, people around the world are celebrating curlews. Curlew Action is holding a special event in the New Forest, an evening of song and conversation with Mary Colwell and singer-songwriter, David Gray. Events are happening in the Brecon Beacons in Wales, in Yorkshire and Bristol; across the world curlew fans are sharing photos, poems, artwork and music to celebrate curlews. I’ve now been involved in three World Curlew Days, each year I end the day exhausted but full of hope. Surely, where there is this much love for a bird, we will not let it disappear, surely, we can turn this around.