I’ve been seeing more patches of blue sky and flower bulbs bursting into life lately, and I feel like brighter days are well on their way. I wish I could say the same for this month’s bird but unfortunately, they seem destined to vanish from our island in the imminent future. Before that happens, we want to share them with youand show off all the things that make this bird one of Ireland’s most iconic creatures. So grab your flower bouquets and prepare your speeches because today we’re celebrating the Curlew (Numenius arquata), known as Crotach in Irish.
At a glance, the curlew is a bird you could easily miss among the various browns hues of the wetlands they tend to hang out in. Their plumage is a generic, dull greyish-brown, suited to blending in, not standing out. But once they turn their head to the side, you’ll see the real reason for this bird’s notoriety: the beak.
Curlews have a long downturned beak that is comically large compared to their (relatively) small heads. To me it resembles the curve of a scythe blade, but there’ve been plenty more comparisons made to other curves (feel free to send me yours in the comments). Their Latin name Numenius derives from the Greek words neos and mene, “new” and “moon”, referring to the sliver of silver we see during that phase of the moon cycle. Arquata, the second half of the name, derives from the Latin word arcuatus which means “bow-shaped”. I love the idea of a new-moon bow so much, I might just have to put it into my next D&D game.
You might be thinking, if this bird’s name is all about their bountiful beak, why is it called a curlew? Well, I don’t have a definitive answer for you but I do have a theory. Curlews have an ethereal call; a sharp whistle that starts off sounding very human, but crescendos on the wind to become this piercing trill, repeating over and over again. This call is often written down as curloo-oo, so it is likely their name is an onomatopoeia!
This spooky call has contributed to the curlew’s iconic status globally. As mentioned previously, they have very plain feathers and can hide pretty much in plain sight when standing still. So imagine being out on the water and hearing this haunting noise echoing around you, but never seeing the source no matter how hard you look. It’s otherworldly; and has inspired the well-known myth of the Seven Whistlers that dates back to at least the 16th century. When birds (commonly believed to be curlews and other migrating waders) flew by at night, calling and whistling to each other, people would attribute the sounds to spirits wailing prophecies about calamity or death. Sailors and miners would refuse to go to work the next day if they heard the “Seven Whistlers” the night before. Some also believed that hearing curlews at night foretold bad luck, while hearing them during the day forecast bad weather, further cementing the belief that these birds are omens.
Obviously this bird that was rarely seen but always heard would serve as a cultural icon and muse in Ireland. Two of our favourite secondary school poets, W.B Yeats and Seamus Heaney, happen to mention curlews in their work. Though there isn’t any evidence of this link I feel like one could easily make the leap from “ominous cry heard on the wind” to “wailing banshee”. Or if you approach it from the angle that a curlew’s cry predicts death, traditional Irish keening could be seen as an homage to this harbinger. Whatever way you look at it, curlews are an important cultural icon that links past and present Irish generations together, immortalised in works of art.
Curlew calls aren’t considered all doom and gloom here at home, however. Hearing their call can also signal that warmer weather would be on the way – probably because this was the time when they’d start breeding. Unfortunately, this summer breeding population has been shrinking.
Globally, curlews are listed as “Near Threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), meaning they aren’t endangered yet. In fact, we happen to get a lot of curlew visitors in winter who fly from Scotland or Scandinavian countries to escape the cold – some 2,500 birds altogether. But here in Ireland and the UK, where a whole quarter of the global population lives, the numbers are nose-diving. In the last 30 years, there has been a 98% loss in curlew populations in Ireland, a staggering amount for the time frame.
Why have they declined so quickly? Well that’s a tale as old as time with perpetrators we all know and loathe: agricultural practices and poor land use. Curlews nest on the ground in rough pastures, meadows, or heather – prime real estates for grazing animals such as cows and sheep. Afforestation (which means planting trees on land where historically there were no trees before) of their breeding grounds has provided the curlew’s predators – American mink, red foxes, magpies, and hooded crows – with new areas to thrive in, at a detriment to the original occupants. In essence, curlews have been pushed and hunted off of the land where they’ve been nesting for centuries with nowhere else to go.
The first time we encountered a curlew, I really thought we might never see one again. We had taken a summer holiday to Mayo with a group of friends and were sitting on some picnic benches with warm takeaway bags of food in Westport Quay. In the distance, Croagh Patrick towered over the Clew Bay, cloaked in a scarf of fog against the misty backdrop of an incoming storm. The weather had been spotty, with frequent lashings of rain that beat at us for a few intolerable minutes before receding back into brooding grey clouds.
Anticipating that the sky would open up again, we tried to eat fast. The majority of the group was focused on food, laughing and lamenting the lack of napkins. Elle heard the mournful cry of a bird in the distance and ever the diligent birder, she sped off to investigate. That’s when she saw one, picking at crabs and molluscs in the tidal flats. She sat on the stone quay for ten minutes, legs dangling over the wall, getting as many photographs as she could (which you can see in this post below!). A grey heron eventually came swooping down and the curlew decided it was time to move on, taking flight and vanishing into the mist.
At the time, I wasn’t nearly as appreciative as I should have been. I remember telling Elle I’d see them in person next time, and as soon as I said it, I had a sinking feeling that I might never actually get the chance to see one again. I have been fortunate enough to see them on a few outings since, but it’s fitting that a bird so synonymous with death and spirits should feel like a ghost while it still lives.
I’m sure you’re wondering if anything is being done to save the curlew, and the answer is yes. This bird is such an important cultural icon, we would be mad to let it disappear without doing something. In 2017, the Curlew Conservation Programme (CCP) was set up by the National Parks & Wildlife service. This programme is funded by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine; and it aims to protect curlew nesting sites and improve their habitat quality.
In their annual report for 2023, the CCP found just 48 pairs of curlew across 9 key breeding areas. Of these 48, 38 were confirmed as breeding pairs while the remaining 10 were assumed as probable breeders. These numbers may seem shockingly low, but this is actually an increase on the numbers recorded in years prior.
The CCP has done great work in engaging local landowners and implementing hands-on initiatives like “headstarting” chicks – taking eggs and incubating them away from their parents to avoid predation. However, these man-made interventions cannot last forever, and if you remove the populations of artificially raised chicks from the analysis in the report, the result is a downward trend that has been decreasing for years. If this rate of chick fledgeling continues, it is expected that the curlew will go extinct as a breeding species in Ireland before 2030.
I wish I could leave you with something more uplifting, but the very sad reality is that this magnificent bird is in dire trouble, and so many more of our birds will end up in the same state if we don’t call for action and start making a change now. We may not be able to save the curlew in Ireland, but we can save others who are not yet on the brink of disappearing. If you are in Dublin, head out to North Bull Island or Booterstown Marsh and see if you can’t just hear a curlew whistling on the wind, while you still can. They may have said in times past that this bird’s call signalled bad fortune, but if you manage to hear the call of one of the rare birds we still have, I’d say you’re one of the lucky ones.
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