For the love of the curlew

In making wader scrapes on his new field, Soldier Palmer unearths some interesting clues to a long-forgotten land

- Philip Murphy

The start of the new year brought a major change of circumstances and opportunity on the farm. A piece of land came up for sale across the boundary and, after a terrific amount of wrangling back and forth, I was finally able to buy it.

In agricultural terms, it's no great powerhouse of productivity. One half of the 60-acre patch is a knuckle of hard granite and the remains of an old Victorian quarry. The other half is a wet meadow next to a heavily drained and badly degraded watercourse, which is more like a canal than a river. It doesn't look like much, but three pairs of curlew come to breed there every year and I have been looking enviously at this place for a long time.

These curlew are almost never successful with their breeding attempts, but the returning birds are stubbornly loyal to the same few acres every year. No matter what I do to make my land more appealing over the boundary fence, they ignore me and choose the wet fields that have always lain beyond my control. Now that these fields are mine, there's a real chance to do some good.

In a world where land use is driven by government policy and global markets, it must be quite unusual for fields to be bought and sold on account of their curlew, but if you're passionately interested in wading birds, you will do anything for love.

Rushes 

One of my first tasks was to cut some of the rushes. These rushes have been gradually expanding over the past few years and certain areas are now much too dense to support curlew. They might be all right for species that like thick vegetation, such as snipe, but it's clear that, as the rushes have expanded, curlew have been driven out of their former haunts.