How the curlew's call inspired some of Britain's best writers

In the opening chapter of John Buchan’s Sick Heart River (1941), the main character Sir Edward Leithen is described as feeling tired of life. A friend tries to engage his interest and asks if he has heard the curlew that year as he ‘usually make[s] a pilgrimage somewhere to hear them’. We are told that, for northerners, curlews, not cuckoos, are regarded as the ‘heralds of spring’.

This brief reference to curlews is poignant. Leithen, who turns out to be terminally ill, is a recurring hero of the Buchan adventure stories, a lawyer and amateur ornithologist, considered among all Buchan’s action men to be the one to most closely resemble his creator in his solitariness and love of nature and wildernesses. The book’s tone is unusually reflective for the master of ‘shockers’ and the manuscript was finished shortly before Buchan’s death in 1940. He would have understood the curlew’s duality of meaning in folklore and literature — a creature that, for some, had life-affirming attributes and yet, for others, stirred gloom and foreboding.

Robert Burns was among those for whom the curlew (Numenius arquata), Britain’s largest wader, was a source of joy. In a letter of 1789, musing on human sensitivity to passing incidents in Nature, the Scottish poet confided that: ‘I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the Curlew in a Summer’s noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover in an autumnal-morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion or Poesy.’

Burns would have heard these long-billed, immensely shy, easily disturbed birds during explorations of the heathery upland moors. Curlews demonstrate immense faithfulness to their breeding grounds by returning to the same sites — primarily moors and farmland edges in northern and western Britain — year after year to pair off and breed (nests are laid in scrapes on the ground), rearing their young throughout the lengthening days of spring and early summer. It is at these times when, gliding and wheeling overhead, their bubbling trills and plaintive cries of cour-lee! cour-lee! have a vibrant, uplifting quality. ‘A moor without a curlew is like a night without a moon, and he who has not eyes for the one and ear for the other is to me a body without a soul,’ an observer told the Northumbrian naturalist George Bolam, who repeated it in his immense study Birds of Northumberland and The Eastern Borders (1912).

Yet the most evocative description of the spectacle of calling curlews was supplied by a Londoner, Henry Williamson in Tarka The Otter (1927). Williamson’s observations for the book were undertaken on Exmoor, between the Torridge and Taw rivers. ‘The birds fly up from solitary places, above their beloved and little ones,’ he explained. ‘And float the wind in a sweet uprising music. Slowly on spread and hollow wings they sink, and their cries are trilling and cadent, until they touch earth and lift their wings above their heads, and poising, loose the last notes from their throats, like gold bubbles rising into sky again.’

Yorkshireman Ted Hughes was another curlew admirer. He read Tarka The Otter as an 11-year-old boy and later asserted that it ‘gave shape and words to my world, as no book has ever done since’. It is fitting that he later settled in Devon, near the River Taw. A hunter in his Dalesman youth, Tarka helped Hughes develop a broader sensitivity towards Nature and the curlew featured in several poems. To Hughes, the bird had ‘a wobbling water-call’ and was a ‘wet-footed god of the horizons’ (Curlews in April, 1979). However, in an earlier poem The Horses (1957), out before dawn in ‘evil air’ and ‘frost-making still-ness’, Hughes found ‘the curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence’, tapping into the idea of it as a representative of eerie desolation.

In autumn and winter, curlews gather in flocks in coastal fields, on rocky ledges or muddy estuary edges and in those bleak, isolated landscapes their cries may assume a ghostly quality. W. B. Yeats spent part of his youth roaming the remoter parts of the Irish coast around Sligo, developing a sensitivity to bird sounds. In He Reproves The Curlew (1899), from one of his earliest collections The Wind Among The Reeds, the mournful sound of a curlew served only to amplify his suffering from romantic rejection: ‘O curlew, cry no more in the air,/Or only to the water in the West;/Because your crying brings to my mind/passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair/That was shaken out over my breast:/There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.’

William Yarrell was the first British naturalist to compile a list reporting on the status of our avian species, but his History of British Birds, published between 1837 and 1843, judiciously mixed fact and anecdote for a wider readership. He noted that in Scotland the curlew was called a ‘whaap’ or ‘whaup’. This, according to Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary, was a name for a goblin ‘supposed to go about under the eaves of houses after nightfall, with a long beak’. There is a further hint of the diabolical in a scene in Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Black Dwarf (1816), in which Hobbie Elliott, a superstitious Borders farmer, rambles the haunted Meikle-Stane-Moor, fearful of ‘o’worricours [goblins] and lang-nebitt things about the land’. He says he once heard a fairy whistling in the moss ‘as like a whaup as ae thing could be like another’.

Sinister or not, curlews are in the proud position of being one of the few species mentioned in one of the earliest known poems in domestic literature. The Seafarer was an elegy whose meaning fascinated J. R. R. Tolkien. Found in The Exeter Book, an anthology of Old English poems thought to have been compiled in the 11th century, it is now accepted to represent the thoughts of a man who has experienced the dangers and deprivations of seafaring life, yet feels a yearning to return to it. In pondering past oceanic discomforts, in contrast to the comforts of life on land, he recalls the loneliness that gnawed at his heart when all he had for company, apart from the roaring of the seas was, variously, ‘the song of the swan, the cry of the gannet and the voice of the curlew instead of the laughter of men’. Curiously, elsewhere in the poem, the cuckoo, usually seen as a bird of the summer, also features as a bird of lament, likely to bring sorrow to those who hear its call.

Sadly, curlew numbers have been declining for decades, although vulnerability has simply heightened their appeal. Mary Colwell’s book Curlew Moon (2018) was inspired by the legend of St Beuno, a 7th-century Welsh preacher whose book of sermons was blown away when his boat was caught in a storm off the Isle of Anglesey, only for the book to be retrieved for him by a helpful curlew. The author describes her 500-mile ‘pilgrimage’ from western Ireland to England’s east coast, exploring the wonder of curlews, the watching of them being ‘an inner experience, at the level of the soul, where the ordinary and the everyday become extraordinary’. A fit and functioning Leithen would have appreciated the sentiment.

This article first appeared in the April 29, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.