Why You Can Still Hear a Curlew in the Yorkshire Dales

For anyone who has walked the hills of the Yorkshire Dales in spring, the call of the curlew is unmistakable. However, the UK has lost roughly half of its breeding curlew within a single generation. The Breeding Bird Survey recorded a decline of 48% between 1995 and 2020, and in 2015 the species was added to the UK Red List as a bird of highest conservation concern. The reason the Dales remain full of curlew has everything to do with the way this land is looked after.

The Yorkshire Dales Moorland Group highlights that the curlew has two distinct calls, a bubbling song that announces its claim to a territory in spring and a sharper, more urgent alarm that it gives when danger is near. The alarm carries meaning for many of the animals around it, and to the gamekeepers who manage the moors, who will hear the signal and respond to it to protect the waders and their nests. Curlews face danger from foxes moving along the gullies, crows hunting across the nesting grounds, or walkers who stray from the path with dogs running loose.

That single response sits within a far larger body of work that mostly goes unseen. Throughout the year, keepers control the predators and scavengers that would otherwise take eggs and chicks, manage the habitat that waders depend on, and walk the same ground day after day so that they can step in whenever a brood is threatened. The value of this work is well evidenced, with the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust's upland predation experiment finding that controlling predators can roughly treble the breeding success of curlew and other waders.

How much is at stake can be easy to overlook, as a recent encounter in the Yorkshire Dales made clear. One of our keepers went to investigate the sound of two curlews alarm calling frantically and found that a family had settled down for a picnic right beside a curlew nest, unaware of the distress their presence was causing. It was only because someone familiar with the moor was out there, and understood what those cries meant, that the situation was recognised at all.

If you are out on the moor this spring and summer and you hear that urgent, repeated call close by, please recognise it for what it is and move quietly away, because doing so remains one of the simplest ways to support the work going on all around you.