There are few more iconic sights than a curlew in flight, but without intervention it could be something future generations will never get to enjoy. Once considered a common species across Britain, the curlew with its distinctive haunting call, is now one of our most rapidly declining breeding bird species in the UK.

To help protect our curlew and reverse the decline, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust has launched an appeal for funding to expand our research into the north of England, where the species is doing better than elsewhere in the UK, to understand regional variation in foraging behaviour and breeding success.

Curlews are long-lived, with high annual adult survival meaning that some live to over 15 years, although the average is about 8 years. This, however, masks the issue of very low breeding success, so that when adults reach the end of their lives there are no younger birds to take their place and the population starts to crash.

In the UK curlew used to breed in marshes, meadows and arable fields, but today they are more often thought of as a bird of the uplands, breeding on moorland areas and farms around the hill edge.