The curlew’s call haunts sands and hills

St Dogmael's, Pembrokeshire I could hear the haunting call of a curlew - faintly, distantly, yet it still had a power to arrest and hold my attention. It bubbled up as though from the water itself, swelled to a crescendo and gently died away

Walking along the estuary-side path on an ebb-tide, I kept an ear tuned for our "wet-footed god of the horizons", scanned with my glass the shimmer around margins of emerging sand-banks for the bird whose curved-beak silhouette is as distinctive as its voice. These river-mouths of western Wales - Teifi, Dyfi, Mawddach, Dwyryd - have a startling textural beauty. Their swirling diurnal intricacy, their light-infused and tide-sculpted Celtic designs of water and sand were once a favourite wintering ground of the curlew.

The haunting call of this largest of British waders, here and in its breeding grounds on commons and wetlands around the higher hills, is surely the most redolent sound of our relict wild country. WH Hudson described it seeming as if "uttered by some filmy being, half spirit and half bird". Here on the Teifi I could hear one faintly, distantly, yet it still had a power to arrest and hold my attention. It bubbled up as though from the water itself, swelled to a crescendo and gently died away.