Orison for a Curlew by Horatio Clare review – in search of a bird often thought extinct

The travel writer traces the slender-billed curlew’s migratory path in a book that’s full of both wonder and gloom

Not any old curlew, this, but the slender-billed variety, a white and gold creature with a scientific name, Numenius tenuirostris, “the slim beak of the new moon”, as evocative as its cry. The plangent sound of the latter captivates the author even as it issues from a Greek ornithologist’s mobile, which, it turns out, is the nearest Clare comes to a bird seen so rarely its extinction is often assumed. Yet as the acclaimed memoirist and travel writer knows well, the quest is what counts and here the focus is on the passionate conservationists he meets as he traces the birds’ migratory passage through southern Europe and the Balkans.

There is much gloom – hunting, pollution, land drainage – but Clare is ultimately buoyed both by the efforts of the curlews’ champions and by its current Shrödinger’s cat-like status, with the lingering possibility of a sighting permitting both hope and wonder to live on.

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