Part 2 of Native: Life in a vanishing landscape

Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape

The waning of the whaup

Continuing our exclusive extracts from his award-winning book ‘Native’, Patrick Laurie looks at why curlew numbers in Scotland are in freefall on hill farms

By Patrick Laurie

Thousands of curlews come to Galloway in the winter. They churn like smoke above the horizon, and they build the illusion that all is well. Sometimes there are hundreds of birds on the flooding fields below the house, and people are reassured to hear them calling over creeks and the glugging merse. You’d never think there was a problem with curlews, but the truth is that winter birds are just visitors passing through. When the time comes to lay their eggs, those curlews will travel on to Finland or Russia. Our own come up from Brittany, and they’ll often land in the same fields where they were hatched. Our problem is that fewer come back every year. I remember the first curlew I saw in our new place. We had no guarantee that birds would return to breed here, and so many have been lost that it seemed unlikely. There was no mention of curlews in the estate agent’s inventory, but the land was rough and wet and the signs were good. One morning towards the end of March, I stepped out under the stars in my dressing gown and there was a bird in the darkness. The old breeding song drooled over the moor like warm steam, and I had to steady myself on a wall.

Curlews play a long game. They come at life with the assumption of longevity, and they live to make old bones. We’ve got hard proof that curlews can live for thirty years and more, but scientific evidence really just confirms something we’ve known for centuries. Curlews were born for old age, and every creaking inch of feather and tendon finds quiet joy in antiquity.

Rather than fire out dozens of youngsters during a brief window of life, the birds pick their moments and mature slowly over several years. They’re cagey and patient, and they know that there will always be another chance to get it right. While other birds dash into boom or bust, a curlew can afford to stand back and watch. In a cold spring or a dry May, they just Whaup illustration by Sharon Tingey

‘I’ve watched 111 nesting attempts in various places across Galloway over the past eight years,’ writes Laurie.‘Only one chick survived to fly.’ At the rate curlews are going now, Laurie estimates that they will be gone in a decade