Curlew in the Mist

Curlews spend their winters on our coasts and marshes, feeding on invertebrates and crustaceans.

Fog creeps like a tide over the Solent marshes, softening the world until nothing remains but shapes and whispers. Land and water dissolve into one. Even the swaying reedbeds lean into the stillness, the waving stems hushed against the blanket that engulfs them. Pools become translucent mirrors, smokey, diffuse and unseeing. Then, from somewhere out there, not seen, only heard, a sound emerges. Not a call so much as a spell. A liquid, looping cry that arcs through the grey. The haunting melancholy of the curlew. It curves and quivers like its namesake bill, rising into the silence with something between hope and heartbreak.

You never see the first one. It arrives as voice before form, a note threaded through the mist. You stop. You listen. You feel it. A sound older than maps, carved into the mudflats and memory of this island.

Here, among the winters wet marshes of the south coast, the curlew is both presence and absence. Always there, somewhere. Always slipping just out of sight. A ghost bird of the estuary.

But ghosts have stories, and the curlew’s story is one we need to hear.

The Decline of the Curlew in the UK

The Eurasian Curlew (Numenius arquata) is the largest wader in the UK, its distinctive silhouette known to many, even if its breeding sites are not. But the song we still hear through the winter mist may not always grace our future. In recent decades, this once common bird has suffered one of the most significant declines of any UK species.

Breeding curlew numbers in the UK have plummeted by more than 60 per cent since the 1970s. In Northern Ireland, that figure rises to over 80 per cent. Once-thriving populations in our moorlands, meadows, and uplands are vanishing. The UK now holds about a quarter of the world’s breeding curlews, making our responsibility to their survival all the more vital.

They are now red-listed as a Bird of Conservation Concern. In plain terms, they are in trouble.

Why Are Curlews Disappearing?

The causes are layered, but most roads lead back to us.

The intensification of agriculture has stripped away nesting habitats. Grasslands are mown too early. Fields are drained. Pesticides reduce the invertebrates on which curlews feed. Forestry plantations fragment uplands where they once bred in peace. Across lowland farmland and coastal margins, ground nests are exposed to trampling, disturbance, and predation.

Our human footprint, vast and deep, is silencing their song.

How You Can Help: Support Curlew Conservation

Yet there is hope. The curlew has passionate defenders. Conservation charities are working tirelessly to reverse its decline and to protect other vulnerable wading birds that share its fate.

Wader Quest is a grassroots charity supporting the conservation of wading birds globally. Their work highlights the shared challenges facing curlews, redshanks, lapwings, and other waders, and they provide funding and visibility for frontline conservation work.

You can be part of this story:

• Support Curlew Action and Wader Quest

• Join local bird surveys and citizen science schemes

• Encourage wildlife-friendly practices in your community

• Share the story of the curlew — awareness leads to action

Curlew Action leads the fight for curlews through science, education, and advocacy. Their work includes habitat protection, promoting curlew-friendly farming, and building a cultural movement around curlew conservation. They understand that we must value not only the biology of a bird, but the story it tells.

A Call Worth Hearing

That morning in the mist, I never saw the bird. But its call stayed with me winding through the fog, coiling around the edges of thought, reminding me of the quiet wonders still clinging to the edges of our world.

To lose that voice would be to lose something irreplaceable.

If we choose to listen, there is still time. Time to ensure that future generations wake to mist and marsh, and hear, rising from the stillness, the echoing, haunting music of the curlew.