With trembling wing and voice, the curlew captured the essence of the marsh. Their breeding numbers in Wales are so low they could be extinct here in a decade. That makes each sighting all the more precious.
The RSPB's Cors Ddyga reserve is truly bioluxuriant. I am lucky to live nearby and explore it often, but one particular recent visit left us thrilled by its riches, and also posed the tricky question: was there a highlight among so many unforgettable wildlife encounters?
One candidate must be our dusk arrival, by way of a deep-set old lane which drops with natural purpose to the broad marsh below. As we descended, moschatel gave way to meadowsweet. Emerging then from the shadowy track to the sunset brilliance of the reeds, we felt like players emerging from the tunnel into a stadium of light.
A case could be made too for the birds that greeted us from the reedbed: willow, Cetti's, sedge and reed warblers, plus the intermittent 'sharming' of a water rail. Two bitterns boomed in stereo, one on either side of our path – welcomed back to Anglesey (Ynys Môn) in 2016 after 32 years' absence as a breeder. The soundscape here can sometimes eclipse the landscape.
Our attention was soon caught by a slender male marsh harrier above the reeds, performing a sky dance, its acrobatic courtship display. With feathers catching the final rays of sunlight, it oscillated high and low, intercepting a chittering band of sand martins, then slipped through a rabble of several hundred white and pied wagtails – far more of them than I have seen before roosting in the reeds, rising and falling, indecisive in their choice of bed for the night.
With darkness approaching, we hear a far, bubbling note. The caller slid half-seen into view. With trembling wing and voice, the curlew captured the essence of the marsh. Yet Europe's largest wader is in steep decline. Sustained breeding failure has resulted in a dwindling, ageing population, and, according to the British Trust for Ornithology, it will be extinct in Wales within 10 years without more of the kind of holistic land management that is nurtured here.
It is no coincidence that World Curlew Day is on 21 April, a day that also commemorates a local sixth-century abbot, Saint Beuno, whose generosity of spirit for the natural world – and the curlew in particular – needs rekindling.
There is, of course, no need to choose a highlight. But there is something special about the curlew, isn't there?
