How Many Woodcock should a Woodcock shooter shoot?
We were walking up Llanvihangel Hill, in that strange border country where the landscape is described in Welsh that the locals can no longer understand. Hybrid names like Upper Cwminon or Cefn Hir Dingle, the mangled sound of Caety Traylow, and everywhere on the moorland the mawn pools, named from the Welsh word for the peat once dug there for fuel. This is the most ordinary and yet also the most particular of places. Once I loved what I saw there as wildness in the landscape and independence of character in the people, but a once-dramatic landscape seems slowly to be becoming boring, with my growing awareness of just how little life, apart from the eternal sheep, exists here, in these hillsides stripped of vegetation by their remorseless grazing, gnawing the hillsides like maggots. The dominance of the sheep seems reflected in the rural culture of sheep and battered Landrovers ranging over these bare uplands, treeless almost, windswept, and yet still tinctured with a wildness of wide vistas and pillowing clouds rising in the thermals over land warmed by the sun that stirs the spirits of us all, poor forked creatures that expand and relax when freed from the fear of cold and wet and hunger by the spring sunshine. There is no music of this place, and the chapels that killed it lie empty now. But high on Glascwm Hill the curlews were crying. They had a nest somewhere in the grass above, and they defended it, circling above us chittering and crying. We dropped down the hillside and the curlews relaxed a little, calling now with the ringing call that stirs my vitals, the stirring spiralling rising call that climbs as if upon the hillside and then falls away on the other side. A call that is for all of us that love it the call of wild places, of beautiful places, of rare wildness and nostalgia. Even this impoverished countryside seemed richly wild when the curlews skated across the up-draughts calling their anxiety for those four mottled eggs nestled among the rushes.
When I was a boy they were so common in the hayfields that they might have their legs cut off by the mower as they stayed upon their nests, thinking the tractor might pass them by, unaware that the chattering blades stuck out to the side of the tractor.
There is little so sadly sickening as the sight of a curlew with no legs still defending its smashed eggs. I wish I had forgotten it. I wish I had not seen it.
Was that the last time I heard a curlew, or was it perhaps that day along the estuary at Kinvara, coming out of the fug and music in the Pier Head bar for some fresh salty air? The tide was high among the creeks of the saltmarsh, and the water-birds were massed on the grassy sea-verge among the dried wrack and bleached shells. The track passed a holy thorn, tattered with rags and ribbons, quietly fading like the memories of the people for whom they were tied there, in some hope of salvation, of a cure, of being kept alive a little longer. I have done the like myself, asking someone to light a candle in the chapel at Carna, wishing that their faith and hope might intercede for someone that I loved, futile though I knew it, someone who was with me that day on the estuary, hearing the curlews calling, wondering what the calls were saying to the other curlews, something quite other than what they said to us. Calls so entangled with beauty and nostalgia and love of place and people, calls maybe beautiful in themselves, if we know what that means, but certainly beautiful because of what they seemed to say to us.
I have not heard a curlew since the last of those days. Not once. And yet it is reassuring to know that in 2016 there were apparently still 59,000 pairs in the UK, which seems like a lot until you see the figures for the declines throughout their UK range, a loss of 49% between 1996 and 2021. The curlew is the most pressing bird conservation priority in the UK, and threatened throughout Europe. Yet in the winter there may be 125,000 curlews in the UK, winter visitors from other threatened populations throughout Europe.
Because we love the curlew there is much effort being put into conserving it, which might be more successful if we know the reasons for the decline. Some people blame badgers, a handy scapegoat popular particularly in the farming community, among those who would like to believe that the badger cull will sort their TB problem. Curlews and badgers have co-existed for millennia; the fact that sheep will eat curlew eggs is less often mentioned by farmers, and the badger cull has not resulted in curlews bouncing back. Maybe as the farmed landscape becomes more hostile to nature, it is the most delicate and the most evocative that we lose first, the Curlews and the barn Swallows, the Salmon and the Swallowtails, until we are left with Pigeons and Crows, the generalists and the scavengers,
The shooting industry conveniently blames the Curlew decline on Crows and Magpies and others that they target as ‘vermin’ on the moors and pheasant shoots. This narrative seeks to recast gamekeepers as conservationists. On the treeless moorlands where Grouse are protected for shooting, gamekeepers kill almost anything that predates ground-nesting birds such as the Grouse, and they are not slow to point out that Curlews benefit from their activities. While I don’t doubt that gamekeepers are pleased to nurture curlews, the propaganda works best because everybody loves a Curlew, and the shooting press does not dwell on the way the gamekeepers destroy Eagles and Hen Harriers and Mountain Hares.
On the other hand, who loves a Woodcock? Have you heard the calls it makes during its mating flights? They are about as melodic as a bullfrog, unlikely to stir your soul with evocation of wild freedoms. You may never have seen one. If you have, it will have spluttered out of the bracken maybe, on a winter walk, disturbed by your dog nosing in the undergrowth, and dropped down again as soon as possible, a bird designed to merge into bracken. They like woodlands and wet places, and feed mostly at night. The people who love Woodcock most are those who love to shoot them.
And yet Woodcock have much in common with Curlews. They are both wading birds. Although Woodcock have evolved to specialise in living in woods rather than wetlands, much of their feeding is at night in wet meadows, where they probe the ground with their long bills like any other wader, such as the Curlew. The Curlew has adapted to breed inland in damp meadows and on moorland, only returning to mudflats and estuaries in the autumn and winter. The breeding population of Woodcock and Curlew in the UK is similar, around 50,000 pairs, and they are also similar in that the population is boosted every winter by migrant birds from northern Europe, and in that they are both in global decline.
No-one would dream of shooting Curlews. Woodcock, on the other hand, are classified as game birds. This distinction is based on nothing other than the tradition of shooting ‘game’ as a pastime for the aristocracy. The aristocracy distinguished itself from the peasantry by reserving for itself certain foods which the peasantry were not allowed to poach, a word that defines the taking by the peasantry of aristocratic food, and illustrates the exceptionalism always applied to the upper classes.
In 1954 the Protection of Birds Act prohibited the taking of birds’ eggs, stipulating repeatedly that it will be an offence if any person “(a)kills, injures or takes, or attempts to kill, injure or take, any wild bird; or(b)takes, damages or destroys the nest of any wild bird while that nest is in use; or (c )takes of destroys an egg of any wild bird. You might have been forgiven at the time for imagining that all wild birds and their eggs were now going to be protected
The repeated use of the phrase ‘any wild bird’ was perhaps deliberately misleading. In fact Plover’s eggs continued to be taken, and sold by Fortnum and Mason, for another fifteen years. In the aristocratic world of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, life was a celebration of beauty, good wine, amusing banter and fresh Plovers’ eggs. The eggs of the Black Headed Gull were also a talismanic food for the gentry. A food that demonstrated that no matter how effete you might have become, you had a direct line to the Georgian aristocracy who celebrated the eating and the shooting of certain wild animals reserved for them and denied to the hungry peasantry. To this day the taking of the eggs of Black Headed Gulls is permitted, in spite of their being classed as Amber on the List of Birds of Conservation Concern, and the system that regulates the taking of this rare food of the aristocracy is administered by English Nature, the same quasi-governmental organisation that advises the government on the Badger cull.
In the UK shooters kill somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 Woodcock annually, which would pretty well wipe out our Woodcock population were it not for the millions of Woodcock from northern Europe over-wintering here. These usually start to arrive in significant numbers at the end of November, and there have been moves to ban Woodcock shooting before the 1st of December. The argument for this change is that when there are so many ‘foreign’ Woodcock in the country, the proportion of ‘our’ ‘native’ Woodcock shot will be less.
This proposal for a later start to the shooting season for Woodcock was shot down in the House of Commons in a debate on 27 February 2023. Various backwoodsmen got up performativity to use the Woodcock issue to demonstrate their place in the squirearchy and, in the case of Bill Wiggin, MP for North Herefordshire, to point out that the plural of Woodcock is Woodcock and that Woodcock have extraordinarily binocular vision. Knowing about Woodcock, he must have supposed, marked him out as a particular kind of country squire. He was quite wrong about Woodcock vision; they have evolved to have virtually 360- degree vision in order to spot woodland predators sneaking up on them, and as a result their binocular vision is much poorer than that of many birds. He agreed that Woodcock are special, so special that they really should not be shot until mid-November or the beginning of December… but went on to suggest that there really wasn’t a problem, so why legislate – missing the point that what was at issue was an alteration to a shooting season that did not require legislation. But his speech had served to use his interest in Woodcock mark his lamp-post as an MP aspiring to the squirearchy.
The call for a later start to the Woodcock shooting season was led by the conservation campaign group Wild Justice. Chris Packham, the best known of the three leaders of this group, has been a prominent campaigner against the slaughter of migrating European songbirds in places such as Malta, shot each spring as they return to countries such as ours to breed. That Chris Packham, who would be revolted at the idea of shooting a Curlew, has associated himself with the campaign to move the start of the Woodcock shooting season to the 1st of December, demonstrates perhaps that such is the power and influence of the class of people who eat Gulls’ eggs and shoot Woodcock, that it would be hopeless to try to campaign to ban the shooting of Woodcock, even though we are shooting the declining breeding populations of northern European countries as surely as the Maltese are shooting ‘our’ songbirds. The ideas and prejudices of the English gentry of the eighteenth century, and the posturing of MPs like Bill Wiggin who see themselves as enhanced by posing as survivors of that antiquated culture and members of the elite as they hold forth on Woodcock shooting, really have no place in enlightened conservation policy, and nothing illustrates the absurdity better than the divergence of views and policies relating to two similar, and similarly endangered, wild birds. Two wild birds, both red-listed as Birds of Conservation Concern, one that we treasure, and one that the smuggest and most entitled of our Members of Parliament will not even consider offering the minimal protection of a slightly later start to the shooting season.
POSTSCRIPT
When all wild birds and their eggs were protected by law, with the exception of those birds the aristocracy liked to eat and shoot, the birds farmers and other landowners like to consider vermin were exempted from protection by the General Licences system, which basically said that although they were in theory protected, you could shoot them anyway because the government department concerned had issued these blanket licences. Wild Justice has been campaigning against these General Licences for some time, and now as a result of their work in some cases you are now supposed to make the case that you are suffering some loss before you can be issued a licence to shoot, for example, Rooks, which are classified as Amber on the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern and have declined by 20% since 1995.
The most curious anomaly may be that birds of prey were not offered any exemptions such as the General Licences. I can only suggest that because the large areas of our countryside used for Pheasant and Grouse shooting are all private property this was not felt necessary. If your estate is private and if your gamekeeper’s job depends on him discouraging ‘trespassers’ and keeping down ‘vermin’ in order to boost the ‘bag’ and to maintain his credibility as a gamekeeper, birds of prey are likely to be discreetly and privately ‘discouraged’ without the estate owner having to issue explicit instructions, and without the general public being able to gain access to see what may be going on. Rare birds of prey treasured by conservationists and often radio-tagged as nestlings still regularly go off the radar when they fly near grouse moors. It is in the interests of gamekeepers, who get better tips if the bag is larger and whose housing may depend on it, and also in the interests of grouse-moor owners, whose estate value is directly linked to the annual bag of grouse shot, that Golden Eagles, Hen Harriers, Short-Eared Owls, Buzzards, Peregrine Falcons, Goshawks and so on should be ‘discouraged’.