Scottish Forestry

go back to the coast. There’s always next year.

At first I groped towards the idea that curlews came to Wullie Carson [the previous owner of the farm, who had died aged 92], but that was just whimsy. Then I learned that curlews live for decades and they’re drawn to old farmers and rough country. That’s when I realised the truth, and there’s nothing metaphorical about it: Wullie’s birds had become ours, and they’ll keep coming here until they die (or I die first). I suppose I’m only a small change for them in a world of new forests, but I shouldered the weight as if it were a planet. That morning when I heard a curlew here, I coiled my fingers around the gate and strained beneath that final legacy. And I could almost see an old man standing in his dressing gown beside me with his ear cocked to the unlit sky.

The curlew’s call stirs up deep wells of pleasure. Any bird can make you smile; it’s fun to hear a lark or a clowny grouse, but a curlew prods you deeper, and it’s more than jolly. The sound walks that spider-line between pleasure and pain, and it conjures up your old connections. I loved curlews when I was a boy and had few memories to call upon. That’s the curlew’s special gift; they’ll wake you to a web of old feelings and it doesn’t matter if they’re not your own. You smile and shudder in one fell swoop, and the day is changed.

So they’re keenly precious birds, and the final pairs are dearer than all that came before them. The bond between people and wild birds is never simple, and we’ve been pressing our own ideas onto curlews for a thousand years. The Gaels called them guilbhron and said they were the voice of the restless dead. It was bad luck to hear a curlew calling in the darkness, and because of this our love grew cool and wary. We were trying to be good Christians, yet the sounds stirred memories of a ghoulish past. And the Church carved a deeper groove in curlews in the seventeenth century.

When the Covenanters refused to attend church services held by the king’s clergy, they shrank away into the hills and held secret ceremonies in the heather while the clouds and the rain scudded by. The soldiers hunted out on the moss for those meetings, and they’d post men on the high ground to watch for suspicious folk. Curlews have sharp eyes too, and they’ll rise up and scream their name at any intruder – ‘curLOO’ carries far across the open ground – and so the soldiers would use the curlews to guide them. Many Covenanters became martyrs when the birds betrayed them, and it was only logical for Galloway folk to call them Satan’s tools, servants of the hated foe. Unable to wreak their revenge on the king’s dragoons, the Covenanters poured their fury into the curlews. Eggs were shattered and the chicks were torn to shreds. Folk would spit to hear the curlew’s call, and the rift was years in the healing.

Hill farmers spend the short winter days in the company of their livestock. The moors are frozen in the long night, and there’s a sense of cabin fever. Maybe that’s why curlews bring such a surge of pleasure when they come. When the weather finally turns and it seems like spring is on course, curlews begin to play out an ancient game. There are territories to define and partnerships to rekindle. I lie behind the dykes and listen to the male birds as they move in slow, mesmeric circles around the old calving fields. The displays are best heard at first light with heavy eyelids and the stars dribbling away into dawn. The birds call in a soft and sober moan for a partner: whoo-UP whoo-UP whoo-UP.

They fly round again and stake their claim on some imagined line. Later, when the sun has risen, they’ll tower up to perform long, delirious glissandos on set wings – that foamy trill is perfectly sublime, but it’s just one of many songs in the curlew’s repertoire. Hushed and almost shady, these predawn ‘whoops’ have made a lasting impression on us. The sound has given us the idea for another name beyond the universal ‘curlew’. We call them ‘whaups’, and the word is a neat and cosy fit. But whaup is falling out of fashion in Galloway as the birds decline. Nobody says it much these days. Whaup has become a sound that old people make, and it withers away as time passes. Besides, things collapse at such a rate that soon we’ll look back on all the names we had for birds and wonder why we ever needed them.

There’s plenty of space for hope in the last days of March, but all’s not well. The curlew’s return has become a crooked and mournful thing over the last thirty years. Their numbers trickle away, and our first reaction on hearing a bird is often relief that they’re still here. But at the rate they’re going just now, they’ll be gone in a decade.

There’s no single nationwide cause for the collapse of curlews. It’s more like a blend of problems has conspired to bring them crashing down with a sickening bump. We can’t find any evil force which consumes the birds and drives them into extinction. It’s just a steady and relentless failure to breed, and this stacks up year after year to spell disaster with the tragic certainty of a leak. I’ve watched 111 nesting attempts in various places across Galloway over the past eight years. Only twelve have survived long enough to produce chicks. Only one chick survived to fly.

Of course I was glad to see curlews coming back to our farm, and the early days of spring purred past in giddy joy. But there would be many problems in the coming months. A return is just the start, and it’s no guarantee of progress.

Patrick Laurie runs his farm near Dalbeattie along lines he hopes will encourage the return of the curlews which used to abound there

Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape by Patrick Laurie is published by Birlinn (£9.99, pbk) www.birlinn.co.uk