About Curlew Country
Curlew Country has delivered real landscape scale conservation on the ground in a short time frame. Based in the Shropshire Hills and Powys borders ,we work in close local partnership with land managers, volunteers and the wider community to achieve success. During its first two active years, nest monitoring revealed that no chicks survived to fully fledge from over 30 nests studied. This declining trend toward local Curlew extinction has been stabilised by Curlew Country’s pioneering work:
Background
Project active since 2015
Pioneered UK firsts for Curlew Recovery
Wide local, national and international engagement
Works with multiple land manager and farmers through a farmer cluster
40+ pairs of breeding lowland curlew – a nationally significant lowland population
149 fully-fledged chicks released into the local landscape since 2017
Stabilisation of population decline through emergency headstarting intervention
Curlew Country is a small independent not-for-profit organisation. It raises all of its income independently. Curlew Country started out as one of multiple projects within the Stiperstones and Corndon Hill Country Landscape Partnership Scheme, hosted by the Shropshire Hills AONB. When the scheme ended the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust kindly agreed to take over hosting arrangements.
Hosting enables Curlew Country to continue to operate independently given the much smaller scale of focus and funding in comparison to larger organisations.
The Curlew Country core area is a hotspot for curlew. There are only a handful of curlew populations of this size (around 40 pairs) outside upland managed moors and reserves. This population is the only population of this size on typical lowland hill land mainly farmed for beef and sheep. This means that this population is of national significance.
