Spring’s missing sights
The bubbling of curlews is a sound that always provokes memories of my teenage years, when I first started to explore the hills and moors that were a backdrop to the house I grew up in.
As spring days arrived my pal and I would travel out to those distant hills by bus and occasionally by train, don our tackety boots and stride out into those well-trodden, wideopen spaces. Each adventure gave us a sense of freedom but, perhaps more meaningfully, allowed us to become familiar with the birds inhabiting those wild moors, most prominently among them the skylarks and the curlews.
Thus as the spring season unfurls and I hear that territorial proclamation of the curlews those memories flood in. While I always look forward to the arrival of the whaups, as I now know them, I am becoming increasingly aware that there are nowhere near as many of them bubbling away in the local landscape as used to be the case.
Nor is the endless reeling of skylarks as familiar as it was a few short years ago. The decline in numbers of both these birds during recent years – and others such as the leaping lapwings – is a cause for serious concern. While it is easy to point the finger of blame at the farming industry and its ever-changing patterns of activity, there is not one farmer of my acquaintance who does not mourn the absence of such sounds.
This week I have seen a curlew and I have heard a lark so there springs in my breast a fleeting feeling of optimism. Yet not long ago I used to boast that my local landscape still rang to the bubbling and plaintiff calling of curlews, the peerless songs of skylarks and indeed the undulating pee-witting of lapwings, where others places had fallen silent.
Sadly, no more. Somehow our landscape is no longer able to support healthy populations of these birds. Such declines surely deliver warnings to us that all is not well with the way we are using our precious landscape.
I read recently that the nightingale, a bird very much confined to southern England, has also declined alarmingly in recent years. It seems the last remaining concentration of these wonderful songsters is in Kent, in an area once used as a military training ground which is gloriously overgrown.
Yet this area too is now threatened with a massive house development which seems quite likely to threaten the complete demise of nightingales as breeding birds in that part of these islands. It can only be hoped that the councillors destined to make the decision value our natural heritage sufficiently to stay the hand of execution.
The aforementioned changes in agricultural practices seem to be impacting heavily on curlews, lapwings and skylarks, among others. A preference now for autumnsown as opposed to springsown cereals, the universal switch towards making silage as distinct from hay and the continuing heavy use of pesticides and insecticides are all cited as reasons for decline.
Intensification and overgrazing too have a massive impact. Thus the lack of suitable vegetation in which to nest and a dearth of food sources are making too much of our farmland unsuitable for these ground-nesting birds.
I guess too that modern tractors, speedier and far more insulated as they are, legislate against the old ways when farmers preparing their ground for crop sowing were rather closer to the land they tilled. The older generations used to keep an eye open for the likes of curlew or lapwing nests and would move them in order to safeguard them.
Even in the uplands things have changed, with overgrazing a real problem in some areas and the planting of more and more forestry, which provides shelter for predators such as foxes. Consequently the survival of fledging curlews in upland areas is reduced.
The descent of curlew numbers has been alarming. It is said that over a period of less than 50 years breeding populations have been reduced by around 60 per cent. And the incidence of skylarks nesting on farmland plummeted by a staggering 75 per cent between the 1970s and 1990s.
I hope we are not witnessing the fulfilment of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ but over the past 40 years the decline in these and other species of farmland birds has been nothing short of shocking. This should be a time to welcome the arrival of birds such as the curlew, the oystercatcher and the lapwing from their coastal and estuarine wintering grounds, to rejoice in the incessant music of the soaring skylarks. Some will arrive, I’m sure, but not in the kind of numbers I remember.
Nothing breathes spring into our lives in the manner of these iconic birds. The bubbling and almost mournful wailing of curlew, the fantastic, athletic flight of courting lapwings, the stupendous reeling of skylarks and the frantic piping of sea pies must not become things of the past.
I live in hope that one spring soon things will get back to where they used to be and my world will once again echo to them. The world will then be a much better place. Hope does, after all, spring eternal.