Dusk in the Norfolk Brecks in spring is a time of strange sounds. From the woods come the rasping bark of a startled roe deer and, by late spring, the mechanical rattle of Africa’s returning nightjars. From the hedge at the edge of a farmer’s field, where a broken oak leans, the strangled yelp of a little owl is heard. And from the last patches of dusty, rabbit-cropped grassland, recalling the once great steppe of the Brecks, rolls the bizarre, sorrowful wail of the stone-curlew.

Sorrow and bizarreness go hand in hand with the stone-curlew (should that be wing in wing?). This summer visitor from southern Europe and West Africa is a bird of unrivalled strangeness, a species that only the keenest ornithologist could love, and one whose fortunes have suffered gravely in the UK in modern history. The stone-curlew’s long legs are Plasticine-yellow and a similar blob adorns the base of its pick of a bill. Also yellow are its huge, crepuscular eyes, with the scornful look of a waspish talent show judge. Its plumage, by contrast, is dusty buff, streaked and speckled in black, the better to break its outline and blend with the hot, dry steppes it calls home.

For centuries the stone curlew was a typical bird in much of Norfolk, so associated with the county’s open spaces and sheep-nibbled grassland that, as late as the middle of the twentieth century, it was commonly known as the Norfolk plover, a name which distinguished it from the green plover, or lapwing, which nested in many of the same habitats. While regarded as common in Norfolk, even to the outskirts of Norwich, by earlier authors, in his Birds of Norfolk, published in three volumes in the late 1800s, Henry Stevenson noted the bird’s decline, caused by the rapid conversion of heathland to agriculture and enclosed pasture and by the collection of eggs.

Rabbit by Elizabeth Dack

The heartland of the stone-curlew in Norfolk, indeed in the UK, was always the Norfolk Brecks. The story of the Brecks Living Landscape and the story of the stone-curlew in the UK are one and the same. The Brecks grassland was formed as early as the Bronze Age with the felling of the wildwood. Light sands, strewn over Late Cretaceous chalk by an Ice Age ice-sheet, made for poor agriculture in the Brecks. So the landscape remained open, rough grazing for rabbits and hardy sheep, mined for flint and cultivated on and off, here and there. This was Norfolk’s broken, shifting steppe, a place of wild sandstorms and great dunes, of rare dry-country plants and roving flocks of great bustards. This was the home of Spanish catchfly and fingered speedwell, and of the strange stone-curlew, which, in a Britain of traditional grazing and agriculture, remained widespread and numerous in the south of England.

In the early Twentieth Century three factors changed the historic Brecks landscape, and the future of the stone-curlew, beyond recognition. A First World War shortage of timber made forestry a national priority and vast stretches of poor Brecks soils were planted with conifers. Later, the invention of chemical fertilisers rendered these same soils highly valuable for agriculture, in particular for the cultivation of carrots. Rabbits, for centuries a pillar of the region’s economy and a force in maintaining its character, became a pest and were wilfully killed in their millions by the introduction of myxomatosis. Even where grassland had not been converted to plantation and agriculture, the loss of rabbits destroyed the centuries-old, closely-mown steppe of the Brecks, the core home of the stone-curlew and of many other species. The Brecks grassland and its stone-curlews were all but lost. Across the bird’s English range a similar story of loss and decline was repeated.

In the Brecks, tatters and shreds of habitat were saved here and there. With visionary financial help from Christopher Cadbury, Norfolk Naturalists Trust acquired and protected stone-curlew habitat at Weeting and Thetford Heaths; elsewhere Brecks grassland was fortuitously spared on military camps. But the UK’s stone curlews seemed bound for the same fate as the Brecks' other great strider over dusty grass, the great bustard, which trophy hunting had wiped out nationally in the 1830s. The UK population of stone-curlews fell catastrophically, by 85 percent between 1940 and 1985, when as few as 160 pairs returned to breed.

Stone curlews are among the latest summer migrants to leave our shores, lurking in the fields until early winter, as though resenting the homeward journey, wondering whether the effort is really worthwhile.

However, since the late twentieth century NGOs, landowners and authorities have worked in partnership to reverse the trend and today the UK breeding population of stone curlews has grown to some 350 pairs, many of them in the Brecks of Norfolk and Suffolk. This tentative recovery of the stone-curlew here represents a parallel recovery in the health of the entire Brecks landscape, and in particular its historic, biologically important grass heaths.

Since 2001, Norfolk Wildlife Trust, the Forestry Commission and Natural England have been working together, enabled by the Heritage Lottery Fund, in the Brecks Heath Partnership. Seven Brecks sites have already been restored from conifer plantation to grassland, and most are now of nature reserve quality, supporting very rare plants including Spanish catchfly and proliferous pink. A further two sites have recently entered the scheme.

A second alliance, including Norfolk County Council, the University of East Anglia, the Forestry Commission, and Norfolk and Suffolk Wildlife Trusts, is known as Breaking New Ground. This title intimately reflects the history of the region’s grassland: Breck literally means broken ground, in reference to the bare earth — fundamental to stone-curlews and many other rare species — which was formed through centuries of shifting agriculture on poor soils, through grazing by roaming flocks of sheep, and the action of the millions of rabbits which lived here prior to the release of myxomatosis.

Two of Breaking New Ground’s initiatives are of particular relevance to the modern story of the stone curlew in the Brecks. The first is the Ground Disturbance project under which, across Breckland, patches of grassland are turf stripped or rotavated, echoing those same historic patterns of agriculture. This is crucial as many of the rarest species of the Brecks — wasps, moths, solitary bees, arable weeds and stone-curlews — rely on disturbed ground for their survival.

A second strand of Breaking New Ground is Wings Over the Brecks, a project which brings the region’s little-known birds to the attention of local people and visitors. Each year, under licence, specialist teams place cameras in the nests of the Brecks’ rare nesting birds, such as nightjar, goshawk, woodlark and stone-curlew, and broadcast the secrets of their lives to visitor centres, including Norfolk Wildlife Trust Weeting Heath. Thus these normally shy birds become ambassadors for Breaking New Ground’s work across the region and the many species which are favoured.

East Wretham Heath by Neal Trafankowski

Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s 9 for 90 are just that too: ambassadors for the diverse and beautiful landscapes in which we work in the county in our 90th anniversary year. Through the year we have met, among others: the early purple orchid, whose blooms stand for the North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape; the swallowtail butterfly, which encapsulates the Bure Valley Living Landscape and our work to preserve it; the white-tailed bumblebee, which represents our reach into urban areas and in people’s everyday lives. Each has its own charm, its own story, but none so perfectly captures the region for which it has been chosen as the stone-curlew, whose fortunes in the UK have been so intimately tied to those of the Brecks Living Landscape.

As autumn embraces Norfolk, blushing the trees’ leaves red and copper and gold, this bizarre, wonderful bird gathers in flocks in secluded fields, away from human gaze. Stone-curlews are among the latest summer migrants to leave our shores, lurking in the fields until early winter, as though resenting the homeward journey, wondering whether the effort is really worthwhile. In recent memory these gatherings might hold a desultory dozen birds, a fraction of the great flocks which must once have formed in autumn in the Brecks. Today, thanks to concerted conservation effort, stone-curlew flocks reach many dozens. Lately a farmer told me of ninety birds gathered at a quiet site he knows. The stone-curlew, though still vulnerable, still in need of human care, is back. The Brecks Living Landscape, which it represents, is richer for the widespread return of its chilling wail. Richer too are the lives of the people of Norfolk, in the knowledge that in the Brecks Living Landscape our own Norfolk plover is coming home.
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