Country diary: The agony and ecstasy of the curlew song | Mark Cocker

Hollinsclough, Staffordshire: A fox has forced a pair into the air as it snuffles for eggs, and they treat us to remarkable array of vocalisationsIn 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. Continue reading...