Peak District Retreat Blog
A blog to share some items of interest about the Retreat and its environment - wildlife or other nature notes and images, or maybe something else. Our barn owl nest box has three cameras so barn owls will certainly feature in our blog, but so will other birds and other wildlife.
We do not commit to regular updates, rather we intend to post items of particular interest when they arise. We do have quite a back catalogue of past images which we may post to ‘back-fill’ the blog, while generally keeping the entries in chronological order.
The curlews are back
The curlews are returning to their breeding grounds around us
We've heard and seen the first curlews of the year. Each year they come to the moorlands to nest on the wet moorland ground which is ideal feeding grounds for them and their chicks.
Staffordshire Wildlife Trust (SWT) manage most of the land surrounding us as a wildlife corridor between the Roaches nature reserve and Black Brook nature reserve. Curlews are a species in decline so SWT pays special attention to managing their land so as to best accommodate the curlews. Curlews like to nest in tall grass for protection, but adjacent to open land so that they can see what is coming. SWT ‘tops’ (threshes) patches of the tall rushes to make patches of open land adjacent to patches of undisturbed rushes. For the last few years, at our invitation, they have managed our land in the same way.
So far I don't have any photos of this year's curlews, so I've attached some photos of a curlew courting display that I observed in 2019, and some other past photos too.
