Where have all our curlew gone?

The Stiperstones, Shropshire We might have been walking towards a future devoid of the riveting, other-worldly call of the curlewA few Sundays ago, Mary Colwell-Hector and I were walking with a bunch of ornithologists and conservationists along the Stiperstones ridge. The scent of gorse drifted on warm air. Sunlight moved over the heather and farmland finding sheep, meadows and cattle. But our talk was more of what wasn’t there. We should have been seeing curlew, returned from the coast to