In the distance of this painting the distant brotherly hills of Frodsham and Helsby sit under a late autumn sky and if you listen carefully you might hear sounds of geese and other autumn passage migrants making their way along the Mersey Estuary. Someone in the reedbeds is waiting patiently, but is he watching, or……

No other British bird has such a distinctive call, one which is often described as a liquid, bubbling, trill and most evocatively – plaintive, a word that is so seldom used in modern speech to be almost synonymous with this species. Perhaps the sound of the curlew cannot be dissociated from the land, for very……