Author, producer and campaigner Mary Colwell talks to us about her publication 'Beak, Tooth and Claw', one of this year's chosen Wild Reads titles, and shares with us the first time she saw a Curlew which led to her founding the charity Curlew Action.
Mary Colwell is an author, producer, documentary-maker and campaigner for nature. Her articles have appeared in the Guardian, BBC Wildlife Magazine and Country Life among other publications. As well as writing a critically acclaimed book on curlews in Curlew Moon, Mary is also a recipient of the David Bellamy Award from the Gamekeepers Association for her conservation work on curlews, and a founder of the charity Curlew Action.
Her 2022 publication, Beak, Tooth and Claw: Living with Predators in Britain, was selected for this year's Wild Reads collection. Wild Reads is a project to encourage readers and wildlife-lovers to explore and celebrate the connection between the natural world and the written word, brought to you by Suffolk Libraries and our partners, Suffolk Wildlife Trust. Wild Reads features a variety of creative writing and arts workshops, each crafted to explore and celebrate the natural environment.
Mary's latest book, The Gathering Place, was published by Bloomsbury in April 2023 and is available on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I clearly remember being entranced by the Ladybird series: “What to Look For in …”, the lovely little illustrated hardbacks that showed wildlife through the season. Not only were the paintings vibrant and realistic, they often had people as distant characters, and I loved those. They showed farmers, or horse riders, people in gardens etc. They made us part of the lives of wild creatures and I really appreciated that. I think that was what drew me to this world, knowing we have to live with wildness, and those books made it seem natural.
I don’t know when I first knowingly saw a Curlew, but I think I must have heard them quite frequently as a child. From the age of 9, I grew up on the edge of the Staffordshire Moorlands and often walked in the Peaks with my dad. Back then they were common, along with Lapwings, and I am sure the air must have been filled with their calls. Much later on, I saw a large group in a field in northern Scotland as I waited for a ferry. It was autumn and they must have been migrating. I remember thinking how elegant and strange they looked with their long bills and legs, and I watched them for ages. When I reached Orkney, one flew over a loch, crying an unearthly, evocative call. It fitted the landscape and the mood of the day perfectly They were with me from then on.
Anyone can help them. If you are an experienced field worker, then local projects I am sure would welcome you for monitoring, ringing, tracking etc. If not, then you can help in many ways. Curlews need space and peace to breed and be free from predators, so, learn about them, find out where the local population is, go and listen to them in the spring, KEEP DOGS ON A LEAD, ask the landowner if you can put up a Curlew Action sign to tell people about dogs and nesting birds. Tell people about how endangered they are and why, encourage children to see and hear them from a safe distance, and do activities on them at school. Raise money for curlew projects/charities (like Curlew Action!) by holding talks, coffee mornings, walks. Take part on Curlew Action's Poetry and Art Competiition on World Curlew Day each year (April 21st) and/or hold your own World Curlew Day event. Most of all, celebrate them, tell people about them and get others involved.
It was a challenging book to write. Ever since I walked 500 miles across Ireland, Wales and England to learn what I could about Curlew conservation, I realised that predation was a major issue. The UK has the highest number of foxes and crows in Europe and endangered ground nesting birds cannot sustain the pressure. It is obvious they need protection in the nesting season, the most vulnerable time for them, but how to do that is the big question. Predator control, especially lethal control, is highly controversial and many people struggle with the idea of killing one native species to save another. I completely understand that. But nothing about conservation is easy, there are difficult decisions to be made, but they can only be made if we understand the sensitivities and are able to back up action with data and compassion. So, Beak Tooth and Claw was an attempt to lay out the differing attitudes to predators and their control so that people can make their own minds up. It isn’t a book to tell anyone what to do, rather, it gives the information to help form an opinion.
We have a complex attitude to predators, some we admire, some we love and others we hate. Some creatures we find cute are as voracious in their worlds as any lion or shark, yet we don’t see them that way - Blackbirds for example. How we feel about a creature is subjective, and that has enormous consequences for how we treat them, and hence conservation.
One very cold, winter night I went out with a predator controller to shoot a fox. His job was to protect nesting waders and foxes are a big problem. He let me try his gun on a target and then we sat in the back of his jeep to wait for the fox to come to bait. The range of emotions I went through was extraordinary. In the end, we were out-foxed and it came after we gave up, but I still don’t know how I would have felt if I had watched one being shot, even though I know it is vital to protect declining birds. I do know I couldn’t pull the trigger.
There is something very special about walking. It is what we are evolved to do. Something about the pace of walking helps thoughts to flow, and the time spent on the road sifts and sorts what has meaning. A slow walk through a landscape allows a connection that is lost with speed, it is a way of being in a place. Both the Curlew Walk and the Camino walks were ways of absorbing and entering another world, the world of the Curlew and the worlds of the millions of pilgrims who have walked the same track in search of meaning.
A bit too early to say, it is still being incubated!
Schubert’s Winter Journey by Ian Bostridge, This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein and lots of articles in British Wildlife.
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. It combines nature, love, landscape, human fraility and power, and the devastation of war in one short but beautiful novel.
I was once a trainee patent agent and helped write a patent for a special bag to carry whippets home after the races. The material helped wick away sweat and it was shaped so the dog’s head could poke out of the top.
