World Curlew Day: The Keepered Moors Where Waders Are Thriving

✅ KEY TAKEAWAY: Active management and predator control by gamekeepers are essential to saving Britain's curlews. Where grouse moors are managed, curlews thrive; without intervention, they vanish. We must back what works.

The curlew's call is the voice of the uplands. This World Curlew Day, it is worth pausing to ask an uncomfortable question: where, exactly, can you still reliably hear it?

The national picture is grim. Britain's breeding curlew population has halved in recent decades, making it arguably our most urgent bird conservation priority. The arithmetic is unforgiving: to hold stable, curlew pairs need to fledge roughly 0.43 chicks each per year. Across much of the country they are managing between 0.2 and 0.3. That is a population in freefall.

Yet there are places where curlews are not merely clinging on but producing chicks well above the replacement rate. Those places, overwhelmingly, are keepered grouse moors.

Four times the success

Research has consistently shown that curlews on managed grouse moors are around four times more likely to fledge chicks than those on unmanaged moorland. On grouse moors, pairs average 1.05 fledglings - comfortably above the 0.43 threshold. On non-grouse moors, the figure drops to just 0.27: slow extinction in plain sight.

Today, gamekeepers on driven grouse moors are estimated to protect 53% of England's breeding curlew population. They do this through year-round work - habitat management, predator control, daily vigilance - funded entirely by private investment, at no cost to the taxpayer.

Why is the difference so stark? Because curlews, like lapwing and golden plover, nest on the ground. Their eggs sit in a shallow scrape in the heather for a full month, relying on camouflage alone. Once hatched, the chicks cannot fly for weeks. In a landscape where fox and crow numbers are unnaturally high - a consequence of the wider countryside we have created - those nests are desperately vulnerable.

Gamekeepers change the odds. Through targeted, legal predator control during the spring breeding season, they give curlew chicks the breathing space to hatch, feed, and fledge. You can create textbook habitat, but if the predators are unchecked, that habitat simply becomes a well-appointed trap.

Proof on the ground

This is not theory. On the Antrim Plateau in Northern Ireland, dedicated keepering in the Glenwherry area has delivered remarkable results. In a single recent season, 69 curlew chicks fledged successfully - more than doubling the previous year's record of 28. Some pairs averaged four chicks per brood, a success rate virtually unheard of in modern conservation without active human intervention.

Those numbers were not produced by committee. They were produced by gamekeepers out on the hill in all weathers, doing the painstaking daily work that gives ground-nesting birds a fighting chance.

What happens when the keepers leave

If the case for management needs strengthening, look at what happens when it stops.

The Berwyn Special Protection Area in North Wales was once managed for driven grouse shooting and held healthy populations of upland waders. After traditional management and predator control were abandoned in the late 1990s, curlew numbers collapsed by 79%. Without intervention, the species could soon vanish from the site entirely.

At Lake Vyrnwy in Powys - an RSPB reserve that receives substantial public funding - a similar trajectory has played out. Since grouse moor management ceased and controlled burning was stopped in 2003, habitat has deteriorated and predator pressure has gone unchecked. Despite millions of pounds of public subsidy, the results for breeding waders have been dismal. By 2024, just a single pair of curlews nested at Vyrnwy.

The contrast could hardly be clearer. On one hand, privately funded keepered moors sustaining healthy curlew populations. On the other, publicly subsidised reserves where, in the absence of active management, the birds have all but disappeared. A hands-off approach is not a neutral choice. It is a choice with consequences - and curlews are paying the price.

A future worth fighting for

There is no path back to some imagined pre-human wilderness. Our uplands have been shaped by centuries of management, and the wildlife that depends on them has evolved alongside those practices. Conservation that ignores this reality is not conservation at all - it is wishful thinking.

The curlew's best hope lies where it has always lain: with the people who know the land. Gamekeepers, moorland managers, and farmers are delivering measurable results for one of Britain's most threatened birds, through skilled habitat management, controlled burning, and predator control. They deserve recognition, not suspicion.

This World Curlew Day, the evidence speaks plainly. Where moorlands are actively managed, curlews thrive. Where management is withdrawn, they vanish. If we are serious about saving this bird, we need to back what works.

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