Country diary

Hollinsclough, Staffordshire

In 40 years of attending to nature in print, I’ve almost never written about curlew sounds. I wonder if this is because they are most completely heard when we are unattending. You hear them unconsciously, as I do as I sit at my desk. Or as we wander a moor or shoreline, and we intuit the voice as being intrinsic to the setting. Curlew sounds live within the whole of the place, but to pick them out is to lose some unitary quality.

Now, alas, we cannot treat curlews as subliminal partners in our land. The population has plunged by half since 1995 and curlews are red-listed here and near-threatened globally.

So the thrill of them on these Staffordshire moors carries additional melancholy. And sadness is, in truth, intrinsic to the voice. “Loveweep” was the poet WS Graham’s unforgettable coinage for curlew song. My birds, however, were faced with a fox whose snouting wander over the moor – timed to the metronomic sweep left and right of its long brush – no doubt included a search for curlew eggs.

The parents rose, and who knows if trickery was at play in the repertoire, but the birds deployed a series of calls. There was the even, assured and rising plee-euw that you hear on any winter estuary – the default voice, so to speak. Then there were anxiety notes, tew-tew, teeuw-tew-tew, rising and intensifying to a shrill staccato blade-like chiff-if-if, which triggers an almost physical reaction among those in earshot, especially if you judge yourself the cause of all that dread and hurt.

The fox wandered away and our mood eased, and the curlew rose high to perform the full vocal display, which strikes me as almost purring or glistening in quality.

The sound travelled towards me on the soft warm air, a spreading pall of music through which the bird slowly fell on upraised wings. Then, with flickering beat, it rose again, winding up the tempo once more, this time with the breast held out, wings aloft, head and bill ahead in heraldic sinuous arc, as if finally to fill itself and the whole landscape with the ecstasy of song. Mark Cocker