Threshold Conversations: Walking Like a Curlew with Matthew Trevelyan

[00:00] INTRO

AMY: The first time I saw a curlew was at a place called Freezeout Lake. It’s in central Montana, and lots of migratory birds stop to rest every year. I was watching and listening to a big gaggle of different birds when I spotted a small group walking around on tall skinny legs, with super long, curved bills, and I was like: who are you? And then they started to call. And it took my breath away.

LONG-BILLED CURLEW CALL

AMY: Now I live part of my life in Umeå, Sweden, and it turns out curlews are the symbolic animal of this region. There’s a big curlew statue in the middle of town, and even better, real live curlews return here every spring. These are Eurasian Curlews, the cousins of the type I saw in Montana, and in Swedish they’re called Storspov. Here’s a recording I made when they flew in on April 23rd, 2024:

EURASIAN CURLEW CALL

AMY: But although I’ve come to expect to see and hear curlews every year, I’m learning that I really should not take that experience for granted. Like lots of shorebirds, curlews are struggling worldwide. One of the places that has seen the biggest declines is the UK. People across the British Isles have coexisted with curlews for generations, but in the past few decades populations there have fallen by half, and in some places they’re down to just a few breeding pairs left. And in fact, in the fall of 2025, one species of curlew, the slender-billed, was declared extinct. Around that same time, I heard about a man who had become so concerned about the plight of these birds that he walked for two days across the English countryside inside a giant curlew costume. His name is Matthew Trevelyan and he works on conservation in Nidderdale—a northern England region close to York where curlews like to nest in the meadows and heathlands. I wanted to learn more about why curlews are in decline, and more about Matthew’s pilgrimage in their honor.

MUSIC

AMY: Matthew Trevelyan, welcome to Threshold Conversations.

MATTHEW: Thanks, Amy.

AMY: So, you came to my attention for a rather extraordinary walk that you took last spring. This was Easter weekend 2025, I think. Can you describe what you did, and why you did it? 

MATTHEW: I did a 53 mile walk, dressed as a giant curlew. That is the headline-grabbing thing, I walked the Nidderdale way. The Nidderdale way is sort of, one of these challenge walks. I've been meaning to do it for about five years. And the Easter weekend was also the run up to World Curlew Day. I think I said I'd do it dressed as a giant curlew without looking how long it was, you know, oh, 53 miles, and I've only got a weekend so I have to fit it into two days. I didn't know what my costume was going to look like at that stage, whether it just be a silly hat or. But I have a tendency to build things that don't fit out the door, so, you know, I made it more like a giant puppet. So the costume ended up as a sort of ten foot long bamboo frame. It was actually a reasonable size. It’s quite streamlined, fitted under most trees, a little bit of sort of crouching to get under the lower branches. But it was doable. You know.

AMY: It's actually beautiful too. I mean, there's a goofiness to the idea, obviously, but the physical object - you made it yourself?  

MATTHEW: Yeah. I mean, I've got a weird background as a community artist and my granddad was a surrealist artist. So if you knew that, it wouldn't come as a surprise to think I was making a giant curlew costume. So in my family, it's quite normal to do things like this. But, I suppose for other farming advisors, it would be a bit strange for them. If you know me, it's not, it's not that strange.

AMY: I feel like your surrealist grandfather artist might have been disappointed that it was so lifelike, because it actually looks, it looks like a curlew. It doesn't look like a surreal curlew. It looks like a real enormous curlew.

MATTHEW: I think the curlew, when you stand back and look at a curlew, it's quite a strange bird, you know, in that it's not immediately beautiful. It's got this remarkably long bill that just takes you by surprise and seems ridiculous in some way. It does have an amazing plumage. And if you try to represent curlew, whether it's a drawing or a giant puppet, it makes you realize how impossible it is to recreate with any degree of accuracy. So it's always a poor imitation of a curlew. But I was determined to not make a fool of this bird. You know, this is a bird I love, and I and I, and I want to celebrate. And I was more concerned about getting the tail feathers right than I was about the 53 mile walk. You know, I think that the artist in you is sort of more concerned that it looks good.

AMY: It does look good. I mean, I obviously just saw online pictures, but it looks beautiful. And, I don't think you did make a fool of it. It's eye catching for its surprising, slightly silliness. But it's also, it's like a beautiful art object. And I'm very curious. What kind of feedback did you get from people? Did you have kids running up to you? Did you have anybody, I don't know, yelling at you?

MATTHEW: Yeah, absolutely lovely feedback. I don't think we had one negative encounter. You meet the giant curlew on a path and I think you had a few people going, am I drunk, you know, have I taken hallucinogenic drugs, you know, but, when they realized that this was real, they’re all smiles, they all had a laugh and all were curious about why I was doing this. And it led to lots of lovely conversations. The best encounters were with kids. You know, we passed a caravan park as it was getting quite late and I still had quite a long mileage to complete. Kids came running out of the caravan in their pajamas, absolutely gobsmacked. What is this giant bird doing? And kids you can really half lie to, so I was telling them about the sort of big red button on the inside that meant my wings extended and I could glide down from hills and, you know, so those are the encounters that were the funniest and the and the most delightful, because we’re speaking to kids about creativity, we’re showing them that you can have fun. It’s quite nice to speak to them as a curlew, not as that boring old farm adviser. Even though Cathy the Curlew had a very gruff voice, rather hoarse voice.

AMY: And a beard.

MATTHEW: Yeah. The good thing about the costume is you could take the costume off and then Cathy becomes the nesting curlew that is your friend you can chat to. So it's kind of fun. And then it worked really well. And curlew also this very charismatic bird, you know, very easily identifiable, very beautiful, they represent kind of a certain type of habitat. And it's a habitat that we have lots of in my bit of the world, in Nidderdale. So they come into my area to breed. They spend the winter at the coast. And in February, around Valentine's Day, they turn up in our landscape and make us all very happy because we hear their call for the first time.

AMY: Did you see or hear any curlews or did they see or hear you that you're aware of?

MATTHEW: We were always hoping that there'd be some kind of interaction between the curlews and the giant curlew. And we absolutely did have curlew the whole walk, for the whole 53 miles, sometimes in good numbers. Yeah. I didn't have a real curlew land on my head. That would have been nice, but we had them very close by. Yeah, particularly in the evening. They were sort of gathering flocks and, you hear curlew first, you generally hear curlew, and they really have a beautiful call. I hope you can place them in your podcast particularly. They have a kind of bubbling call, sort of rising, gentle, swooping, rising call. And it plays around for a while, goes up and down. And then then at the end of it rises a bit more suddenly.

CURLEW CALL

MATTHEW: It's just, it's just gorgeous. And so we had that all the way around. And we have quite a lot of curlew still in our particular region, although they have declined enormously. So if you speak to a 60-year-old farmer, he will tell you that they used to be far more. But we're still very lucky to have fields full of flocks of curlew. 

AMY: This whole project made me smile so much, and is delightful. But it also does have this serious undertone. And a few months ago, the news of the, what is it, the slender billed? 

MATTHEW: The slender billed.

AMY: Going extinct. I mean, it just broke my heart. It just broke my heart. And we're losing so many, so many amazing animals, and then to learn that Eurasian curlews, if I understand correctly, they mean they've gone from being considered a species of least concern to being on the red list in a few decades.

MATTHEW: Absolutely. I mean, curlew were still being shot as a sort of game bird in 1984, you know, amazingly, but actually have been declining since the postwar period. Really, I think we've seen a massive decline in them in areas that were former strongholds, such as Wales, Ireland, parts of Scotland, southern England, catastrophic declines. Gone from, in the Republic of Ireland, from 150,000 pairs to 150 pairs. In Dartmoor, which is a little national park in southern England and Devon, I think they're down to two pairs on this national park, you know. So that when you get to that point you're absolutely desperate. You know, you have so many resources you put out to sort of save the last two pairs in your bit of the world. It's madness. You've got to start conservation when you've got a chance still. And that means now. There's a danger we take them for granted here. So yeah, we've got to make a big effort to conserve the ones we've got.

AMY: What are the main threats to curlews globally?

MATTHEW: Well, it does change. The threats to Curlew in Sweden are different to the threats to Curlew in Yorkshire. Climate change would be an issue for all curlew. So when you're migrating and the weather does strange things. Or when you get to an area and there's a drought. But in particular in Yorkshire and most of England, the two main causes of decline are farming becoming overly efficient and farming systems changing. 

MATTHEW: So the way we manage our landscape has changed, particularly grass harvest. Curlew are a ground-nesting bird. That's the distinguishing thing about them. And they quite like nesting in meadows that farmers put aside to grow a crop of grass. So they like to nest in those fields, and the grass slowly grows above them, and they can just pick their heads out and look around. But unfortunately, the grass harvest is now taken multiple times every summer. Along come the mowers and take out the nest. 

MATTHEW: It used to be that farmers would take one cut of hay at the end of the summer and that farming would work in a patchwork and small fields would be cut slowly and the family would slowly get made into hay. But now a whole valley can be cut by a contractor in one afternoon. Machines are much bigger. Farmers aren't in control of it. The weather window is often very small to do that, and so everyone's under pressure. Time is money, and that's disastrous for ground nesting birds. 

MATTHEW: The incubation period is four weeks, and as soon as the chicks are on the ground, they're out and about. Their tactic to hide from threats is to crouch down in the long grass and of course, the mowers, you know, crush them. So we have to make it worthwhile for farmers to delay their grass cutting. Compounding that problem we've got much higher numbers of mesopredators across Europe, but particularly in England for us in our local project, that means we've got more foxes and more crows than we've ever had. And the reason for that is, again, the changes in the way we manage landscape. And it's a really tricky subject. But we do have to think about predation.

MATTHEW: Curlew lay four eggs a year. We only need them to hatch and raise to fledging one chick every other year for a sustainable population. So it's doable and it just requires a bit of love and care and to start is to fall in love again with curlew. For people to understand that this is a bird you'd do anything for, and that you're prepared to sacrifice a bit of profit on your farm for, that you're prepared to give up time for, you’re prepared to donate money towards. You know, once you're in love with a bird, it's very easy to do all that.

AMY: What kind of feedback do you get from farmers when you talk to them about curlew conservation?

MATTHEW: Farmers and land managers tend to have a really special relationship with curlew. They don't always know that they're a red listed bird. So especially the younger generation, they haven't noticed the decline. We get some people, who are already in love with curlew, and they've passed that down, that love of curlew down. And it's taken for granted that curlew are a part of your responsibility as a farmer, and looking after them is part of your daily work. And then we get other farmers that are, even if we paid them, wouldn't do anything. So it's really varied and you have to work at farmers own pace. The first year of a project, you might not get them fully on board, but you might be three years down the line that they get it and they come on board. But the projects that we work on, some of them are led by farmers, you know, so it's farmers that have instigated them. And we've simply come along and offered support. We're sympathetic to farmers because they're totally essential. They hold the power, really, to make the change, the big changes. 

AMY: So last question for now, because I know you need to go. How does it make you feel when you hear curlews?

MATTHEW: This is the reason curlew are so popular and people rarely have a negative thing to say about curlew, because the other wading birds, they have songs, but they don't, they don't evoke quite the same level of feeling. And people think that the reason that curlew song is so special is because it contains minor and major notes. So it starts with…I could whistle it. I can't sing it, Amy, but I could whistle it. 

AMY: Whistle it!

MATTHEW: It goes, it goes,

WHISTLING

MATTHEW: And I can't do the end bit but it gets higher and higher. It rises and rises into this amazing, ecstatic bubbling. It contains minor notes which make you feel sorrowful, wistful, sad. And then it contains major notes that make you feel joy. That's the idea. In the past that's been seen as a foreboding of death. You know, it has all sorts of associations with it. And artists and poets and musicians have been inspired by curlew for centuries. To think that you would grow up and not hear a curlew song would be tragic. And of course, lots of people, they won't hear that in places that they once would have done, so that they don't know it, but they're missing something. I've always taken it for granted. I've always grown up in an area where there's been curlew and, it's, you know, in our bones, you know, it's essential to who we are, and yeah. Curlew give me a sense of intense joy, really. Yeah. I feel moved and delighted when I hear them.

MUSIC

CREDITS

This story really isn’t complete until you see Matthew inside his giant curlew costume. You can find a picture at our website, thresholdpodcast.org. And we’ve got some breaking curlew news: Cathy the Curlew is taking another hike, joined by the love of her life, Heathcliff. This time, it’s the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge —  a demanding 24-mile hike in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. You can donate to support Cathy and Heathcliff in this adventure, and the proceeds will go to curlew conservation organizations. One of them is curlew action.org, which is run by author and conservationist Mary Colwell. Mary actually inspired Matthew with her own curlew-awareness trek across the UK in 2016. Again, you can find links to all the information at thresholdpodcast.org

Threshold Conversations is produced by Sam Moore. Our music is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Thank you for listening.