Curlew

I was weeding a garden this afternoon in Sarnau, a little village about midway between Oswestry and Welshpool, and was delighted to hear a curlew calling from somewhere quite close by.  Although we mostly think of curlew as shore birds, they nest on our upland fields and moors, and it's nice to think they might be nesting in the pasture fields close to the garden I was in today.

The curlew is a large brown wader with a distinctive long and downward-curving bill.  Its call is quite melodic but also has a touch of the wilderness about it, to my ears:  it always sets the hairs on my neck tingling.  Here for me it's an iconic sound, rivalled only by the cuckoo - which I've also heard locally this year, for the first time in a long while.