Curlew Moon. Mary Colwell
spread into the distance, the air shimmers with dancing sunbeams. My sister Sarah and I stand on the shore of Lower Lough Erne, 300 square miles of freshwater, waving reeds and tranquillity. We place a lock of my mother’s hair onto the surface and hold hands, watching as this little piece of her is carried off on the waves. Enniskillen, built on an island between Upper and Lower Lough Erne, was her home town. Dementia took her a year ago to this day. Even though the disease systematically destroyed her faculties, right up until the end she would smile at the mention of Fermanagh and Lough Erne.
Our family home was in Stoke-on Trent, as unlike County Fermanagh as you can get, and one of the things my mother and her family often reminisced about was the sound of summer fields, with vocals provided by corncrakes. Their grating croaks filled the warm night air from April until September. They are consummate callers; one bird can deliver 20,000 rasps a night, which can be heard a mile away. Their Latin name, Crex crex, gives a good idea of the sound; a piece of hard plastic scraping a cheese grater. The mythical poet, warrior and seer of ancient Ireland, Finn, called corncrakes ‘strenuous bards’.
In the early twentieth century there were tens of thousands of corncrakes breeding throughout Britain and Ireland, flying in from southern Africa in the early spring. The lush fields shaped by traditional agriculture provided them with perfect habitat for nesting. Their numbers were legion, but that alone is no guarantee of safety. The swift changes in farming practices and the switch to silage wiped them out in a generation. By 1994 not a single corncrake was recorded breeding in Northern Ireland. They simply disappeared from a landscape where they had been a part of agricultural life for centuries. Occasionally a solo male will still arrive and emit a lonely call from a field in Tyrone or on Rathlin Island, hoping to attract a mate, but so far his song has gone unheeded. Today their rarity has turned them into celebrities. If one is heard calling, crowds gather alongside TV, radio and newspaper reporters. So keen are people to hear that wheeze once more and reconnect with the sound of their yesterdays, they are willing to travel from miles around. Many listen in tears.
Northern Ireland is not alone in losing corncrakes. The early nineteenth-century English poet John Clare was familiar with the feathered croaker as he laboured in the fields of Northamptonshire. Back then, they were literally everywhere in the spring and summer months, but it was almost impossible to find them – they could disappear without a trace, all the while still calling loudly. Corncrakes are accomplished ventriloquists, throwing their croaks around the meadow. Just when you think you’ve got one cornered, it is sneakily creeping through the grass on the other side of the field. A trick John Clare was familiar with:
And yet tis heard in every vale
An undiscovered song
And makes a pleasant wonder tale
For all the summer long.1
Yet by the middle of the twentieth century the corncrake had gone from England and Wales as well as most of Scotland. Today it still breeds in the Western Isles, where concerted conservation efforts over many years have restored their numbers to around 1,000 calling males. Could there be a starker example of how we can eradicate wildlife from our lives? Corncrakes were once a widespread breeding bird in the UK, and now they are barely a memory. What happened to the corncrake is happening to the curlew throughout much of its range, which makes conservation projects like the one on the islands of Lough Erne all the more important.
Lough Erne is one of the largest lakes in the UK. It is divided into Upper and Lower Lough Erne, separated by a pinch point upon which sits the city of Enniskillen. There are around 154 islands dotted throughout these great lakes. As with so many places in Ireland, Lough Erne abounds in myth. According to legend, it was named after Erne, a Lady in Waiting to the warrior Queen Meabh, who fled from a fearsome monster emerging from a cave. She was drowned in the lough, and as her body dissolved in the water she infused it with life-giving powers that nourish the surrounding land. There is often a moral to these tales of tragedy: where life springs from death, and fear and destruction make way for renewal.
Northern Ireland saw more than its fair share of destruction in the closing thirty years of the twentieth century. In a war between two sides defined largely by their Christian denomination – Protestant or Catholic – the violence had little to do with doctrine and everything to do with social justice and the distribution of power. The Troubles tore Northern Ireland apart; 3,600 people lost their lives and thousands more were injured. In 1987 Enniskillen saw one of the worst attacks. Twelve people died and sixty-three were injured when a bomb exploded in the city on Remembrance Sunday. I spoke to my mother on the phone that day and remember hearing the despair in her voice for a country where there seemed to be so much religion and so little Christianity.
Those years of misery not only blighted lives but also took their toll on the economy of the North. ‘There is a sense of wanting to catch up after the decades of low investment during The Troubles,’ says Brad Robson, the RSPB’s Conservation Manager for County Fermanagh. ‘Conservation isn’t really a priority. It’s not that people don’t care about nature, the land is in their blood, but they want the country to make up for lost years.’ Since the end of The Troubles, Northern Ireland’s economy has grown at twice the rate of the rest of the UK. In the midst of all this rebuilding, the loss of breeding waders might have been considered as little more than collateral damage.
There are forty-three islands in the RSPB reserve on Lower Lough Erne. Twelve of them are managed for breeding waders, intensively so for the last few years. There have been successes, not just for curlews but for other species like redshank, too. An auspicious place, I think, to begin a walk for curlews. The day before I begin, I meet Brad at dawn in a layby on the side of the road that follows the western edge of Lower Lough Erne. Paddles in hand, we walk down through the trees that fringe the shore to a hidden Canadian canoe and push off into cold, calm, grey water.
Islands, particularly uninhabited ones, always hold an air of mystery. Gazing at them from afar, they tantalise the imagination. Landing on their shores is an exciting step into a different world, even though the one we are headed for is very well trodden by conservationists. As we paddle towards Muckinish Island the rhythmic splashing of the oars adds to the sense of early morning peace. I experience pangs of grief at the thought of my mother’s hair floating somewhere on the surface. There are no cars on the roads, no planes overhead, just the lapping of water and a cold breeze. I am half hoping to catch a glimpse of the fabled Lady of the Lake; a beautiful woman dressed in white, who, so the story goes, walks from island to island carrying garlands of wildflowers. She is said to step lightly over the surface of the water, barely visible through the morning mists. To see her, so they say, is an omen for good times ahead. But there is no drifting mist or floaty lady scattering blooms, just an increasing amount of noise as we get closer to the island.
The honking of Canada geese can really get under your skin. In the still morning air they sound like an unruly orchestra of home-made instruments. There are other calls, too, if you could but hear them through the geese. The lovely whistle of sandpipers occasionally cuts through, as does the urgent, panicky piping of the redshank, the sentry of these watery worlds. And then, as our canoe moves closer, the thrilling sound of two curlews calling and bubbling above us, slicing through the anserine cacophony. They are flying high and scythe through the air above the leafless trees that fringe the island, before swooping low and disappearing behind the canopy.
Muckinish Island is small. We walk around it in twenty minutes, accompanied by the sounds of indignant Canada geese strutting around their huge nests. Brad gets a text message to say a curlew has been found dead at another location, probably the victim of a peregrine attack. The air reeks of guano and the ground is rough underfoot. To me, this island seems overworked; it has the feel of a place that has had a lot expected of it for many years. Generations of farmers brought their sheep and cows here to graze, crops were grown in small fields, and now it is a carefully managed bird reserve. Most of the trees and scrub have been recently cleared, leaving mossy stumps, easily tripped over. It’s had invasions, too. A few years ago, some badgers managed to swim the 250 metres that separates Muckinish from the mainland. They established a sett and swiftly set about eating the eggs and chicks of nesting waders. A shiny electric fence now stretches across one side, separating