The last time I heard a curlew was on Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk.
The bird rose above the winter-brown reeds, wings beating a course towards the fields inland. The time before that, a pair had lulled me into sleep with their eery harmonies, while I lay in a sodden tent near the source of the Thames.
Today it is Good Friday, recorded bird song is bubbling above the traffic of Stroud town centre. As the procession of the cross begins its drumbeat pace towards the church, I peel away from the crowd towards the rising “currrr-leeewwww” call.
Cameras point from the town’s clock tower on a busy junction, to a scaffold where the street-artist “ATM” is working on the sepia tones of a curlew, 12 feet across. The bird is striding, its long beak bowing towards the soil.
The image represents Europe’s largest wading bird, the ‘eurasian curlew’. It often melts into mudflats and marsh, but with a 6-inch beak and a 3-foot wingspan, it is unmistakable.
The concrete canvas stretches into the meadow flowers amongst which the bird lays her eggs in springtime.
In the Vale of Gloucester where the unique pastureland is nourished by seasonal flooding, only 30 nesting pairs remain.
The Director of Curlew Action – writer and broadcaster – Mary Colwell fields questions from shoppers in the street. Stroud, neighbouring Peter Scott’s Slimbridge and the birthplace of the activist group Extinction Rebellion, is a fitting setting to mark the fragility of this indicator species.
Mary isn’t a firebrand, she speaks thoughtfully, she doesn’t need noisy rhetoric because her message is compelling. “What do you need to do to be a good environmentalist?”
She asks herself “I don’t know, I can only tell you what I’ve done. Find the thing you love and then do everything you can to save it”.
On Good Friday this town is being reminded of the threat of extinction and the need for an ecological resurrection.
http://www.curlewaction.org/
