Curlews in Culture

The call of the curlew has heralded spring in many parts of the UK for generations and inspired a wealth of folklore, poetry, art and music.  Their unique vocalisations - which feature complex harmonics and pitch variations - are often described as haunting, but just as often as ecstatic. Perhaps this partly explains why curlews have stirred such a range of responses from poets, musicians and writers.

Curlews in Folklore 

In UK and Irish folklore, curlews have often been seen as a bird of ‘bad omen’. Their distinctive sound - a rising, haunting call that echoes the eeriness of estuaries or moors - has no doubt contributed to associations with the otherworld. One well-known example is the legend of the ‘Seven Whistlers’, which dates back to at least the 16th century. People would hear flocks of birds - commonly said to be curlews - calling as they flew at night and ascribe these ‘wailings’ to spirits that foretold a death or calamity. Sailors, fisherfolk and miners would refuse to go to their work if they heard the ‘Seven Whistlers’ the night before. While hearing curlews at night was thought to forecast bad luck, hearing them in the day was said to precede the arrival of bad weather.

Bad luck, sorrow and wet weather isn’t all curlews are associated with though. The Welsh folktale of St Bueno tells of how a curlew rescued an abbot’s sermons from the sea. In return he made their nests particularly hard to spot to help curlews rear their chicks in safety.

Where curlews breed, their bubbling calls are often considered to be a symbol of spring; still haunting perhaps, but not in a negative way. Many people, myself included, associate their sound with the passage of seasons and therefore to cycles of life and death; there might be ghosts in there, but there’s also rebirth and renewal.

Curlews in Writing

Curlews feature particularly strongly in poetry. These writings provide a commentary of our feelings towards them down the ages. In one of the earliest known English poems, ‘The Seafarer’ (10th century), the subject recounts how upon the desolate and frozen ocean, he was driven to seek comfort in ”the voice of the curlew, instead of the laughter of men”. More than a thousand years ago then, the curlew was already being associated with loneliness, melancholy and bleak, empty spaces. We can find echoes of this theme in far more recent poems - from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Author’s Prologue’, which addresses the curlew herd “Ho, hullaballoing clan / Agape, with woe / In your beaks” to perhaps the most famous of all curlew poems - Yeats’s ‘He Reproves the Curlew:

O Curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the water in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.

There is certainly something about the sound of curlews (the author and naturalist W. H. Hudson described it as that “uttered by some filmy being, half spirit and half bird”) that provokes strong feelings - both good and bad. While Yeats evidently wasn’t much of a fan, Robbie Burns couldn’t hear the “loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer’s noon … without feeling an elevation of soul”. Similarly, in ‘From the Republic of Conscience’, Seamus Heaney uses the solitude and peace of a small island (he was inspired by a trip to Orkney) as a metaphor for conscience, with the curlew, which he hears upon arrival, “high above the runway”, associated with both wild places and this certain ideal state of mind.

The curlew also features strongly (and fondly) in the work of Ted Hughes, which is not surprising since Hughes was raised among the local farms of Yorkshire’s Calder Valley. In his essay ‘The Rock’ (1963) “the moist voices of curlews” express “the spirit of the moors”, while the poem ‘The Horses’, reflects the way that memories seem to cling to the curlew’s song:

In the din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place.
Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Associations with memory, nostalgia, and loss are particularly relevant when we consider the curlew’s recent struggles. As the researcher and author Bethan Roberts eloquently puts it, “poetry and song echoes the curlew differently when heard with an ear to the curlew’s demise” - folklore and poetry, like the Seven Whistlers or Yeat’s ‘He Reproves the Curlew’ might now be seen as prophetic.

The ‘curlew’s cry’ can also be heard as a call to action though. Mary Colwell’s book, Curlew Moon (2018), recounts her 500-mile walk from the west of Ireland to the east of England to raise awareness of the curlew’s struggles. As she encounters them, and discovers their associated stories, poems and myths, her book reflects the extent to which the natural world is bound up with art and culture, and how their entanglement can inspire conservation. Perhaps surprisingly, Colwell isn’t the only writer to undertake a recent curlew pilgrimage. In Orison for a Curlew (2017), Horatio Clare journeys through Greece and the Balkans, chasing the ghost of the slender-billed curlew, last seen in 1995. As ‘curlew roadtrips’, both books are in some ways contemporary equivalents of Fred Bodsworth’s Last of the Curlews (1955), written from the perspective of the final remaining Eskimo curlew on earth, as it undertakes a final ill-fated migration from the Canadian Arctic to the Pampas of Patagonia. The Eskimo curlew is now assumed to be extinct (the last confirmed sighting was in 1963) , while the slender-billed curlew is, at best, teetering on the edge of extinction. Time will tell whether we look back on Mary Colwell’s book as a familiar precursor to demise, or to action.


Curlews in Music

Given their unique musicality and rich folkloric associations, it’s not surprising that curlews have already appeared throughout music - occasionally in some fairly surprising places. Peter Warlock’s famous song cycle, ‘The Curlew’, is based on the poems of W.B. Yeats, and provides Yeats’s famous curlew poem with an appropriately anguished accompaniment. The eerie quality and spiritual context of Benjamin Britten’s church parable ‘Curlew River’ is similarly fitting. That bewitching “half spirit and half bird” quality of curlew voices is reflected in the work’s libretto by William Plomer: “Birds of the Fenland, though you float or fly / Wild birds, I cannot understand your cry”. The mysterious ‘otherness’ of curlews is perhaps captured most powerfully in the orchestral work ‘Cantus Arcticus’ (1972) by Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara. Its first movement, ‘The Bog’, incorporates curlew sounds recorded on the bogs of Liminka in northern Finland. For me the piece evokes both the unique feeling of these wet, wild places and that special ecstatic-sadness of curlews. Elswhere, the curlew as a simple harbinger of doom might explain its unexpected appearance in various other pieces, such as Brian Eno’s ‘Burning Airlines Give You So Much More’ (1974), said to be inspired by the Turkish Airlines Flight 981 plane crash, and ‘The Final Moments of the Universe’ (2009) by Richard Dawson, which includes the epic line, “The curlews on the mudflat are probing for invertebrates, the clerk in the factory is sending faxes”.

As we start to realise just how fragile curlews and their songs are, creative responses to them become more poignant and take on new meaning. The musicians behind Northern Flyway (a project that explores the ecology, folklore, and symbolism of birds), have created a track that incorporates the curlew's bubbling spring call and ends with a plea to “reignite the spark”, while Grasscut’s track ‘Curlews’ evokes the beauty of a sound “all but lost to me now”. Playing on the ‘different echoing’ of folklore, harpist Sarah Deere-Jones reformulates the Seven Whistlers as a tale that forewarns our own doom. Through works like these, and in wider society, I think a simple but important realisation has started to gain new momentum - if biological loss is also cultural loss, then surely culture and creativity must play a part in biological protection. Continuing a rich history of curlew-inspired creativity, the Curlew Sounds Project will assemble an array of new creative responses, featuring celebrated musicians from various genres. This time though, it’ll be on their behalf. As well as raising awareness for curlew conservation, proceeds from the album will directly support the RSPB’s Curlew Recovery Programme.

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