Onomatopoeic

I'm suffering from a horrible cold at the moment, and I was in two minds today whether to get up and go out, or just pull the duvet back over my head and suffer horizontally. But bright sunny days in January aren't to be wasted, and since changing my camera gear I've rediscovered my passion for wildlife photography (thanks R, for nagging me!), so I levered myself upright, wrapped myself up like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and went off to Upton Warren.

The birding wasn't great, to be honest, but in my experience it rarely is at Upton Warren, so I wasn't unhappy with a day count of thirty species, three of which were new for the year, and took my 2023 list to sixty nine. The best photo opportunities of the day were provided by some reed buntings around the Water Rail Hide at The Moors, and I've posted a shot of one of these to Facebook, if you'd care to see it.

It was mid-afternoon when I decided that The Moors had probably given up all it was going to offer, and went off to take a look at the salt water pool called The Flashes. This tends to be quiet in the middle of winter, but a couple of chaps I passed on my way down to the Avocet Hide told me that there were "a few bits and pieces around". At first sight these seemed to consist of some teal, a handful of lapwing and a couple of moorhen, but the only other person in the hide pointed out a distant snipe, which is always a nice tick to get. And then, while I was still scanning with my binoculars, came the unmistakeable call: Cur-lee, and in flew half a dozen curlew, which landed just in front of us and began preening. "They came just for you," said the woman, and as it genuinely did feel like that (especially as within ten minutes they'd taken off again, moving from this lovely sunlit position into deep shade), it would seem rude not to post a couple of them tonight.

The curlew is a long-legged, long, billed wader which is related to the sandpipers and snipes, and uses its extravagant bill to probe sand and mud flats for the invertebrate and crustacean prey on which it feeds. It's in decline across Europe, and is Red Listed in the UK, which means that it's a priority species for conservation. The main threats to its survival in this country are loss of its preferred breeding habitat, which are rough grasslands, moorlands and bogs, due to intensification of farming and reforestation; and predation of its eggs, mainly by foxes and mustelids. There is a DEFRA-funded project under way in England, to help boost the number of curlew chicks surviving to adulthood, and move the species a little further back from the brink of extinction.

There's some fun and less-fun curlew information here and here if you'd like more facts; plus a rather sweet little film of a pair of adults with two chicks on this Wildlife Trusts page.