Today is World Curlew Day, on which we’re encouraged to celebrate the largest wading bird in Europe, with long legs and curvy beaks making them perfect for finding food in our coastline’s thick mud. They love the coastline around Cleethorpes, Grimsby and Immingham. A tall wader, curlews arrive along our coastline form July onwards with their numbers peaking in January. A group of curlews is called a curfew, a salon or a skein. You can often spot them on football pitches along our coastline, looking for food in the torn-up turf. Their ‘cur-lee’ call is distinctive along with their long down curved bill that has a flash of pink underneath. They use this curvy bill to eat worms, shellfish and shrimps from the mud flat.  Due to their eating habits, female curlews have a longer bill than the males. The Eurasian Curlew was once a common sight across the UK, but their numbers have drastically declined over the last 40 years. On average, we have lost 60 per cent of the curlew population in England and Scotland since 1980. They are now a red list species with only 58,500 breeding pairs in the UK. Once Curlews make it to adulthood, they are very hardy birds but many don’t survive to fledging age. This is due to changing landscapes, habitat loss, recreational disturbance, climate change and natural predators. Curlews take 90 days to nest successfully, they need a variety of tall and short vegetation to provide cover and food. Loss or change of habitat has been a major factor in the species decline. Mitigation sites like Novartis Ings provide a safe habitat for curlews and other birds to rest and feed. Curlews are one of the species for which the Humber Estuary has been classed as an internationally important habitat and is protected in law. Why is World Curlew Day today? St Beuno is the patron saint of curlews and his feast day is 21 April. Legend has it that the Seventh Century saint was sailing off the coast of Wales and dropped his prayer book into the water. A curlew is said to have scooped it up and brought it to safety.

Farmers and beekeepers are better connected thanks to an online tool called BeeConnected, which connects beekeepers with farmers. The free app, currently connecting more than 3,000 beekeepers with almost 2,000 farmers, is designed to send anonymous notifications to surrounding beekeepers whenever crops are sprayed with insecticides.

It has been developed in association with the NFU, the British Beekeepers Association, and Croplife UK, and is funded and administered by the Voluntary Initiative. and .

The system works when triggered by farmers, who set up a ‘spray event’ when they apply insecticide to a field. This ‘event’ searches for beekeepers with hives within a 5km distance of the field and sends them an alert message. The beekeeper and farmer can also use the platform to communicate anonymously using the BeeMail internal messaging service. Beekeepers cannot see the location of individual fields and likewise, farmers cannot see the location of individual hives. The VI Farm Sprayer Operator Of The Year, Steve May, who is both a sprayer operator and beekeeper explains the benefits of the scheme: “BeeConnected gives me the best chance of warning local beekeepers that an insecticide may be applied and when it’s going to happen, allowing them to take any necessary action. It creates an invaluable link between local farmers and beekeepers.”

Steve is also the spray liaison officer in his local area and explained that, as he doesn’t have the phone numbers for many farmers or beekeepers due to GDPR rules, BeeConnected allows the two parties to come together without the unnecessary middleman. “It’s much quicker and can give more precise information on crop protection products being used and the area they are being used in. The BeeMail service is particularly good as the beekeeper can ask questions and this allows dialogue to strike up, which can lead to better understanding on both sides.”