Curlew Blog

Curlew Summit, No. 10 Downing Street, 8th July, 2019 – Blog by Project Manager, Amanda Perkins In my last blog, I promised to write more about the Curlew Summit at No 10 Downing Street.  We were still very active with seasonal activities at the time of the summit.  Whilst not hot off the press, the […]

Blog by Amber Bicheno, Project Assistant On Monday the 29th July, our 33 headstarted curlew were finally released into the wild. The day was many months in the making and changed frequently due to numerous factors out of our control. Originally, we hoped for 2, maybe even 3, releases of smaller batches of birds, as

Glamorous events – Habberley A snapshot of the Life of the Project Manager, Amanda Perkins This blog was started a few weeks ago but has taken until now to complete as ‘other events’ have intervened. Saturday 6th July It’s been a glamorous few days.  On Saturday Billy Clapham, the fantastic young film-maker from Bristol, came

Now lambing season has come to an end; the ewes are all sheared, we’ve carried out all of the work on the lambs to prevent fly strike, worms and (some strains of) pneumonia; Many of the ‘spring’ calving cows have calved and grass harvest is around the corner, we seem to have a little time

In 2017 and 2018 Curlew Country carried out headstarting of curlew, a first for the UK. In 2018, 21 chicks were successfully released at fledging stage, some of which have since been spotted on the south coast within larger flocks. The headstarting was carried out in house, on a shoe-string budget, after 2 years of

Blog by Amber Bicheno, Project Assistant With summer (supposedly) in full swing, it is the busiest time of year for the Curlew Country Team. We’ve had 40 eggs collected from wild nests, and carefully incubated with help from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. It has been an amazing learning experience for me, to have these

Amanda Perkins, Project Manager Blog We would like to say a big thank you to Spring Watch for raising the plight of curlew and highlighting the curlew recovery work being undertaken by the small Curlew Country team. We are grateful too to Curlew Champion Mary Colwell Hector who put Billy Clapham, the film-maker, in touch

In early May 2019, we invited a number of our volunteers to attend an evening about curlew nest finding. The aim was to help others to help us and to improve our chances of finding those outlying curlew pairs which remain elusive. Every year we are newly reminded of the struggle to find these nests,

The haunting cry of the Curlew crept into my childish soul without my even noticing. My father kept a boat in Poole harbour, which involved hours of waiting around for his disinterested offspring. On cold winters days, I would sit in the car after primary school, while he scraped or painted or fought with wind-born

Curlew Country works closely with farming partners and is delighted that young farmer Rhian, who works with her dad and partner on the family farm, has found time to do a guest blog for us. We hope this will be just the first.  Looking Back on Last Year      Sitting in the beautiful March sunshine, last winter is still

Read part 1 of this blog here…   A national shortage of mealworms started to present us with some real concerns. The two largest UK suppliers had suffered unfortunate incidences at a crucial time, one suffering a fire and another a power failure. By banding together and rushing across the county to collect small quantities