Notes from RSPB Geltsdale
Hi everyone! This summer I’ll be travelling to five priority areas for curlew conservation across the UK, and recording sounds from across their breeding season. I’ll be keeping notes, written up here as a kind of diary. I hope you’ll enjoy coming along with me for the journey.
Day 1.
This morning I arrived at Brampton Train Station in Cumbria, a short drive from RSPB Geltsdale. One of those stations out in the middle of nowhere, it made me think of the poem ‘Adlestrop’, where Edward Thomas’s train breaks down, and he’s left listening to a local blackbird “and round him, mistier, farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire“. I listened for curlews, just in case, but didn’t hear any.
Waiting for me at the station was a friendly local taxi driver, Linda, who had managing to fit picking me up around the afternoon school run. I’d forgotten to bring any cash, but she didn’t seem to mind very much and refused to share her bank details when I offered to transfer her the fee. Ah, to be out of London!
On our way to Geltsdale, I told Linda what I was doing in the area, and asked her what she thought about curlews. She hadn’t in fact heard of them - even though she was born and raised in Brampton, just a few miles away. Strange how even the smallest villages can shield us from the surrounding nature. Before long, the taxi was rumbling tentatively along a bumpy winding track and towards what looked like an old cottage, but which in fact turned out to be the RSPB’s visitor centre. The site manager, Stephen Westerberg, and farmland warden Ian Ryding showed me around, and it wasn’t long before I heard my first curlew in years. The sound, combined with the presence of two familiar plants (ground elder and sorrell), gave me a feeling of long-awaited relief, like dipping into a warm bath after a hard day’s work. I couldn’t resist tucking straight into some sorrell, which has always been one of my favourite wild plants to eat - sour and tangy.
Stephen told me how he finds it hard not to think of the curlew as a common bird, and it’s easy to see how you might continue to take them for granted in places like this, where they still return year on year. I’ve travelled hundreds of miles to hear this sound though, and now I’ve found it again I understand more than ever just how precious these places and sound worlds are, and how lucky I was to grow up with these birds all around me.
Looking out onto Geltsdale Valley
Day 2.
I’ve been provided with a sofa bed by RSPB staff, and last night it was a wonder to just be able to lie there and listen to the curlew’s slightly eerie calls again. It also turns out that there’s a Barn Owl roosting in the loft. I discovered this from its dead-of-night exorcist impression.
I got up just before 05:00 and stepped straight into my boots and out the door, with just my recording gear and a Tunnock’s caramel wafer in my pocket. Excitement replaced tiredness as I set off towards a suitable hill where I’d been told I might find breeding curlews. The sound of the dawn chorus was almost deafening when I put the headphones on - countless tiny birds (warblers, robins, blackbirds) making the bushes shimmer with song. A little down the path I heard a cuckoo. I love that we still have no idea how newly-fledged cuckoos find their way back to the same valleys as their parents in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite having never met them (they are raised in the nests of various smaller bird species, like reed warblers, dispatching their step-siblings and hogging all the food from their unwitting foster parents).
Although I could hear plenty of curlews in the distance, none were nearby, and I began to get the impression that I’d chosen the wrong hill. Besides, my one wafer clearly hadn’t done the trick, and stomach grumbles were all I was hearing in my headphones. With more mornings to come, I thought it best to head back.
I’m already beginning to settle into a new routine and some set rituals. As my favourite Scottish poet Ivor Cutler once said, “there’s comfort in a narrow seam”. I’ve consistently found this to be true throughout life so far. Even when I was pulling several all-nighters in a row at university, there was something weirdly comforting in the fact that there was nothing else really to think about; nothing else to do. And all the while, the company of that 'one desk and that one cup and that one type of coffee, that you might shortly never see again. Speaking of cups, one of the things I like to do when I’m in a new place is find myself a good teacup. I like to think I’m not alone in getting attached to mugs. Perhaps it’s because we get more intimate with them than most kinds of crockery, and because they provide us with warmth.
It looks like my daily routine will be:
04.00: Porridge (to avoid my stomach being regularly featured on the album).
04.30 - 10:00: Traversing the hills with my sound recording equipment and occasionally falling into bogs.
10ish: A second breakfast upon return to base.
12ish: Cataloguing recordings.
16ish: A little more late-afternoon/evening recording.
19ish: Write up these notes and attempt to sleep. Early nights aren’t so hard to achieve here, since I have no WIFI and almost no data.
There’s comfort in a narrow seam.
My latest mug friend.
Day 3.
I slept better last night, and the porridge plan helped.
Today I went up to the ridge and towards yesterday’s distant curlew calls (above the lake, Tindale Tarn), and was quickly rewarded. Pairs of curlews were circling around a piece of moorland, the males singing their bubbling song as they carried out low, arcing display flights, flapping their wings and rising through the air before descending gracefully. At times I was almost directly below them. I’m a little worried that I picked up too much of a distant road on the microphone, but hopefully some audio editing might take out some of those frequencies.
As well as displaying curlews, I heard grasshopper warblers, which were new for me (no prizes for guessing what they sound like). It’s also a huge pleasure to be among lapwings again. In my mind, the sound of curlews and lapwings always go together. They nest on slightly different ground; lapwings prefer very short grass, whereas curlews like it a little longer. A displaying lapwing is a wonder to watch and listen to, just as special as a curlew in its own way. Firstly there’s the vocal sound, which is a bit like a loud, obnoxious ringtone, and secondly their frenetic, dipping and diving flight patterns (the zipping of their wingbeats is also a key part of the display). I recently came across this great recording by Gavin Vella.
Later in the day, Ian popped in with a welcome delivery of food (the ground elder salads with water dressing were beginning to get tedious), followed by the Curlew LIFE project officer for Geltsdale and Hadrian’s Wall, Christina Taylor. I interviewed both Ian and Christina about various aspects of their work, including what we can learn from the invertebrate colonisation of cowpats.
Day 4.
Today I headed off along another ridge, on the opposite side of the Tarn. This time I got even closer to curlews, and recorded something I wasn’t expecting. One pair seemed to be racing each other, flying so close together that their wingtips collided. They were probably completely oblivious to me, huddled next to a dry stone wall, as they flew about 10 metres above my head. I barely caught any vocalisations, but I did catch the sound from their wings. Upon landing, they carried out a kind of courtship dance - jumping a short distance off the ground and flapping their wings at each other.
At the end of Tindale Tarn
I was sitting down, catching my breath and munching on caramel wafer number 906 on the far side of the lake, when suddenly a cuckoo landed only a few metres from me on a fence post, accompanied by a couple of reed warblers. It struck me as a bit strange that the warblers were so close to the cuckoo, given the time of year. Baby cuckoos tend to be seen later in the summer, being fed by warblers or other small birds whose nests have been parasitised. But here they were, sitting right next to each other. It almost seemed like the bizarre shared story between these species had somehow cast a shadow of closeness over them. I was too mesmerised to reach for my phone or my camera, and, by the time I thought of it, they’d flown off.
Day 5.
Today I decided to head for The Gairs - a much more remote area of moorland. It was magical out there, among roe deer and red grouse, two species I’m not used to hearing at all. After a long hike I reached an abandoned house, deep in the valley. I later found that it had been lived in by two generations of game keepers and, before that, workers in the local mine. It was almost completely silent. There weren’t many curlews around, but after waiting a while in that spot, a single bird came and circled the valley, calling loudly before heading up onto a high ridge. I decided to follow it, and set up my microphone on higher ground. It was from this position that I heard not only a curlew’s beautiful, ‘low whaup’, but another species of bird whose call stood out sharply above the moorland. For some reason I thought to myself that it had a “golden plover kind of feeling”. When I checked later with Ian, he confirmed it. I must have had a golden plover memory deep in me from home.
Check out this fantastic recording of a Golden Plover via Xeno Canto.
Up The Gairs (abandoned building, bottom-left)
On my way back from The Gairs, I had a memorable encounter with a pair of barn owls - all of us caught by surprise. They flew out suddenly from a shed and turned their cat-like faces around in flight to take a good look at me. A part of me froze in wonder. There’s something especially ‘elevated’ about barn owls, just as there is about curlews. I guess some birds are more elevated than others (didn’t The Smiths once say something about that?).
A little further along, I recorded snipe drumming above a section of marshland. During the snipe's courtship display, it falls from the air, holding out its modified tail feathers in the slipstream. This causes the feathers to vibrate, resulting in an indescribable, mechanical shivering sound (in Japan, I’ve heard that snipe are occasionally referred to as 'Thunder Birds'). Since they don’t hover, trying to spot a snipe against a blue sky is even harder than trying to spot a skylark.
This afternoon, RSPB warden Ian Ryding - who is also a musician - invited me to a band practice so I could hear one of his songs - ‘Curlews Call’.
Ian (centre) with his band, Talkin Fellas
Day 6.
Today I left Geltsdale at 8am, managing one final recording session up near the Tarn before I was picked up by taxi. Thanks once again to Linda of the taxi service Airbus 2000, who returned me to the train (this time I was able to pay). If you need a taxi in Cumbria, you know who to call! Bring cash.
I loved my time in Cumbria - thanks to Ian Ryding, Stephen Westerberg, Steve Garnett, Christina Taylor and Janet Fairclough.
One last sunrise at Geltsdale
For videos and more from my trip to Geltsdale, see my curlew highlight reel on Instagram