No book of recent times has shed light on a glaring conservation issue in such a way as Curlew Moon. The book is a journey through the UK and Ireland, in the areas of the country where curlews live and charts their alarming decline. The UK and Ireland at times hold half of the world's curlew population and a quarter of its breeding population. Yet this responsibility to protect the bird has largely been neglected and in a lot of places the population is crashing, at a great rate.
The curlew is well known as a bird, our biggest wading bird, with its distinctive curved bill. It is common on the estuaries in winter and is well known to mountain walkers in summer where it nests on the fells. Yet a few pairs still hang on in lowland England and this is where the front line in curlew conservation is taking place, where if they disappeared from here then it may be too late to save the species altogether in the rest of the country.
In Curlew Moon the author Mary Colwell takes a 500 mile journey through curlew country, from Ireland, through Wales, the Midlands and Yorkshire, at a time when the curlews should be nesting. She really shows her passion for the birds, and her attempts to stay positive in the face of such gloom. What is evident from the book is how few curlews are left in the places she visits that once held so many. The author tries her best to bring the landscape alive, how they are attractive to the birds but there are so few curlews left now, often just the odd solitary pair seen in these places, the last hangers on to a country that doesn't want them. Habitat destruction, disturbance, an increase in predators means too few curlews are raising young to replace the current population. Worse off seems Ireland, where the population has crashed greatest of all, but there doesn't seem the combined effort to protect the few remaining pairs left there.
In her journey in Curlew Moon Mary Colwell meets the people who try to protect the curlews, and a part of this book is about their struggles, the single person facing all the different forces that are against curlews, their often hard fought struggle to help this species survive. The conservation of curlews is as much about their effort as it is about the large organisations, the local heroes who work tirelessly to protect the birds.
Although about curlews Curlew Moon is a daming state of the countryside in general, where the niche and unusal animals have no real place in modern day agriculture and hence the modern day landscape. The author really brings alive what curlews mean to the landscape, through lore, the place names, poetry, how much a longing for place can be created by the bubbling sound the curlew makes, but also how much has been forgotten in modern times, that most farmers and users of the countryside no longer remember them or what they meant.
What Curlew Moon leaves us with then, is not something positive, there is so much to do to even stop the decline, but provides a germ, a turn around in perception, and an identity that there is something wrong and a need for something to be done. With a joint effort, maybe, just maybe, the curlew may survive as a breeding bird in this country and its bubbling song may be heard by future generations. With people like Mary Colwell behind them the curlew has at least some hope of survival in this country.
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