Where to see curlew in the UK

How to find curlew

A curlew in January and a curlew in April are the same bird living two entirely different lives, and only one of those lives involves the sound people go out to hear. The national record curve gives none of this away: across 16,537 occurrence records in the nine counties with enough data here for a curve, March is the most recorded month at 10.7% and June the quietest at 6.2%. Four and a half points between the best month and the worst, which reads as a bird that is simply always around. It is not. Those nine counties peak in six different months, one of them has no curlew records at all in December or January, and the odds of seeing a curlew — never mind hearing the thing worth hearing — depend far more on the ground under the county than on the date.

The county that goes to nothing is Greater Manchester, and the site those records surround is Dove Stone, where a Pennine reservoir climbs onto blanket bog that is being rewetted. Its 2,350 records run 590 in March, 732 in April and 474 in May, then fall off a cliff: three in September, one in October, two in November, none whatever in December or January. On the Welsh shore of the Dee, Flintshire's 3,448 records do the exact reverse, 606 of them in January against 59 in May.

That is the curlew's year, laid out by two reserves that keep opposite halves of it. Birds that spend winter probing estuary mud move inland and uphill in early spring to nest on moorland, rough pasture and damp fields, then drift back to the coast from June as breeding finishes or fails. None of that comes from occurrence records — it is general ornithology — but the records show precisely where each half lands. The estuary counties bottom out in May: Flintshire at 1.7%, Dumfries and Galloway at 1.9%, East Lothian at 4.9%, the Isle of Wight at 5.0%.

The return is earlier than most people expect, which is the practical half of all this. The Isle of Wight holds the largest single block of records here, 3,605 of them around the drowned estuary at Newtown, and 42.4% fall in July, August and September, August alone taking 15.8%. Adults that have finished breeding, and the ones whose nests failed, are back on the mud in July while the moorland counties are still counting their last few. Turn up at an estuary in high summer expecting an empty shore and you will see curlews on it.

What the estuary will not give you is the song. On the coast a curlew mostly says its own name, a plain rising two-note call, usually thrown over its shoulder as it goes. On breeding ground in April the male climbs, then sets his wings and glides down pouring out a long bubbling trill that speeds up and then unwinds into something closer to a whistle. It carries an extraordinary distance over open moor, which is just as well, because the bird producing it is generally a speck against the sky.

Two things to settle before claiming one. From late April into May, and again from July to early September, the curlew-shaped wader on the shoreline may be a whimbrel: smaller, shorter-billed, with a dark crown divided by a pale central stripe, and a call that is a flat rippling run of about seven notes rather than a rising two — hence the old name of seven-whistler. Those are exactly the weeks when the curlew counts here are moving in opposite directions from one county to the next, so check the head pattern rather than trusting the silhouette. The second thing is the bill, which varies enough between the sexes that a mixed flock looks wrong until you know why: females longer and more evenly curved, males noticeably shorter.

Do both halves and do not expect either to stand in for the other. For the song, Dove Stone is the only moorland site in this list — the reservoir circuit is level and surfaced, but the birds are up on the open bog, and reaching them means a climb into whatever the hill is doing that day. For numbers, the Solway and the Dee. Campfield Marsh on the Cumbrian shore is free, open at all times and has a level 300-metre track to its first viewpoint, in a county whose records are most recorded in October.

The last thing to know is that curlew are the hardest waders on an estuary to approach. They stand furthest out, they lift first, and at a site with no cover you will spend the visit watching them at whatever range they chose. East Lothian, whose 2,178 records here are gathered around Aberlady Bay and also peak in October, is watched from a reserve with no hides at all — it is walked rather than watched from cover, over a timber footbridge and a 1.5-kilometre crossing of the dunes — so take the telescope and accept the distance. One caveat about the list underneath. Fermanagh's curve rests on 51 records, barely over the fifty-record floor this site applies, and Powys has a curlew site with no curve at all; neither says anything about the bird, only about how much has been recorded near those two places.