Help us save the last Curlews of the Upper Thames

Aim

Curlews in the Upper Thames are on the brink and need our help. We are working with farmers and volunteers to turn their fortunes around.

**UPDATE** Amazingly, we reached our target of £25,000 within just one week so we stretched our target to £50,000 to allow this vital work to save our last Curlews to continue for another consecutive year, so even more chicks can fledge successfully. By the end of our campaign the Crowdfunder raised a brilliant £48,659! This show of support for our Curlews has been truly humbling - so many generous donations from 305 supporters and dozens of lovely comments. Thank you so much!

💚💚You can still donate too!!! There are still match funds available (as at 9 December).  This may triple the value of your generous donation.

💚💚Our match funds are from the Aviva Community Fund, BA Better World Community Fund and by the Trust for Oxfordshire’s Environment.   

Our breeding Curlews are on the brink. With your help, our partnership can help protect the wetland habitat where Curlews come to breed and feed. These habitats are highly effective carbon sinks and provide natural flood defences – both extremely important in the fight to prevent and protect against the impacts of climate change.

A Curlew calls to its chicks in an Upper Thames meadow. Photo: Mark Hunter

🐣 Why Curlews Matter

"I take my gladness in the sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men", The Seafarer - c.10th century Anglo-Saxon poem. 

Curlews are an iconic bird species of the British landscape and their haunting call has inspired artists, poets and nature-lovers for generations. Yet Curlews are now a Red List species, meaning that they are at urgent risk of extinction. In just the last 20 years, the UK has lost half of its breeding population. The Upper Thames is home to 10% of the UK’s remaining lowland breeding population (just 60 breeding pairs), urgent action here can help ensure future generations can still hear the Curlew's call.  

There is hope. Curlews return to the same breeding sites each year. With your help, we can give them a fighting chance by protecting the habitats in which they breed and feed. 

Curlews are considered an “umbrella species”. Their conservation requires large areas of high-quality habitat to be protected and managed sympathetically, which also benefits many other species. And by conserving these habitats, we can safeguard entire ecosystems. In the Upper Thames, many of the other species to benefit are, like the Curlew, highly threatened. These include Lapwing, Skylark, Water Vole, Harvest Mouse and Narrow-leaved Water Dropwort (a rare flower of floodplain meadows).

The Curlew's breeding grounds are farmed grasslands, especially wet meadows and hay meadows. In recent years more extreme weather in spring, likely linked to climate change, has impacted on breeding success.  Wet weather in 2024 caused some nests to be flooded and birds displaced away from the favoured nest sites and chicks became chilled in very wet grass. Conversely, hot and dry conditions in 2025 delayed the growth of grass making nests more obvious to predators and providing chicks with less cover. Our work will seek to mitigate these impacts in future years, working with farmers to deliver practical solutions which will secure the long-term future of Curlews in this landscape.

Two of the young Curlews that fledged successfully in 2025. Photo: Mark Hunter

An extremely important aspect of our project is collaborative working with farmers to provide the support needed to protect breeding birds and tweak land management, where needed, to help Curlews breed successfully.  Our programme works in partnership to highlight and support farming practices that enhance the health of the land and soil, recognising their vital role as natural carbon stores. 

With increasing engagement by farmers in conserving Curlews we can work towards expanding the habitats to increase the quality and capacity of the land to provide natural flood management benefits. 

🌍 Our Vision

We want curlews once again to thrive in meadows and wetlands across the Upper Thames - their wonderful, evocative, calls echoing across the landscape each spring. We want to ensure that future generations can experience the joy of seeing and hearing these beautiful birds in the wild. 

To achieve this, we must scale up our efforts—expanding to more river catchments, supporting more volunteers, and working with more farmers. 

Curlew chicks fledged from nests that the Partnership protected in 2025.
Photos: Mark Hunter

🌄Small Change, Big Impact

Every spring Curlews return to breed in wet pastures and hay meadows - often where generations of these wonderful birds have nested every year for decades. Sadly, many of these special places are no longer suitable for them to breed - often due to agricultural change and the building of new roads and housing. 

Curlews thrive where sustainable farming practices enable the development of grasslands and soils packed with the Curlew's favourite food - the earthworm. These soils are also great at storing carbon and can help slow the flow of water during flood events - both extremely important in the fight to protect against the impacts of climate change.  

In recent decades wet grasslands have been successfully restored by farmers and nature conservation charities in the Upper Thames. This project seeks to nurture these first 'green shoots' of Curlew recovery. Working in partnership with a network of organisations we will help farmers to protect this iconic wading bird breeding on their farm, providing advice and support for restoring and managing wet grassland and hay meadow habitats in a Curlew-friendly way. 

Often small changes in land management can deliver big benefits to Curlews, for example - delaying a hay cut can help chicks survive; removing livestock from a field for a few week while they nest will improve the likelihood of a nest hatching.  

💸 How We’ll Use Your Donations

We’re aiming to raise £50,000 to continue and expand our proven work. Your support will help us:

• Take action by working with farmers, volunteers, and conservation groups 
• Facilitate farmers and volunteers to collaborate in helping their local Curlews
• Provide training and essential equipment for volunteers and groups 
• Coordinate and sustain nest protection efforts 
• Expand our work to new breeding areas 
• Research and trial new methods to improve habitats, nest and chick protection 
• Raise additional funds to sustain the project long-term 

🌿 About Us

This programme and campaign are led by Wild Oxfordshire, a charity dedicated to supporting nature recovery action 'on the ground’.   

Match-funding and admin support comes from the Trust for Oxfordshire's Environment as part of its mission to help find funding to protect and restore nature and its habitats across Oxfordshire.    

The Upper Thames Wader Group are a collective of volunteer fieldworkers, farmers, landowners, local groups and other interested individuals and organisations who work collaboratively on the ground to help wading birds, including the Curlew, to survive. 

With extra funding this programme can allow us to develop this partnership further, with more local initiatives working to save the Curlews and to protect their habitats and the flood plains where they breed. 

Our project works across the Upper Thames, centred in Oxfordshire and flowing across to neighbouring south Warwickshire and Buckinghamshire - Curlews don't recognise county boundaries!

🌿 What our partnership has achieved so far

Over the past five years, collectively, we have protected 110 nests using temporary electric fencing, resulting in a 74% hatching success rate—a huge improvement compared to the average hatching success of 25% for nests not protected in this way. Thanks to these efforts, 61 young curlews have successfully fledged. 

There has been a collective approach to finessing the immediate need to protect the nests from predation by ground dwelling mammals and disturbance by grazing cattle and sheep. 

Moving forward, this campaign will allow the project to work with more landowners to support changes in land management that will help Curlews breed successfully.  With more farmers involved in the programme, Curlew nests can be located more quickly and the landowner can have prepared a plan of how to manage their farming to work around the six-week period after hatching until the young Curlews can fly confidently. Over time we will seek to ensure that more land can be managed for Curlews whilst also delivering increased carbon storage in soils and absorbing water during flood events. 

🙏 Please Donate

Every pound helps us to develop relationships with the landowners and to protect more nests and give Curlew chicks a chance to survive and thrive. Together, we can bring the Curlew’s song back to meadows and marshes across the Upper Thames.

💚 Messages from our supporters so far 💚

• Great work going on already for a great cause.
• Curlews are one of my favourite birds, so thank you for protecting them!
• You are doing such brilliant, admirable work. Really hope you reach the target.
• One of the best bird calls is that of the Curlew. We need to hear it more in Oxfordshire.
• The evocative call of the curlew makes my heart simultaneously sing and weep. May it be preserved forever.
• Good luck! The Upper Thames area is really special, and this is a great project.
• Wonderful work! These beautiful birds must be protected at all costs!
• Curlews are iconic birds of the floodplain meadows. Great work by Wild Oxfordshire and all groups creating habitats for curlews, and the work to protect their nests and fledglings.
• Top stuff. Really great partnership!
• Every spring I hear the curlews' enchanting calls over Otmoor. Would that it will always be.
• Thank you for your work on saving the Curlews, I would hate for this beautiful bird to disappear.
• Great cause, the Curlew needs our help.
• Birds bring so much joy to our lives - my little boy Calum absolutely loves watching them. Wishing you the best of luck in protecting more Curlew nests and helping these beautiful birds thrive
• Thank you for your important work saving these beautiful, soulful sounding birds
• Very important to keep curlews breeding in England
• Great effort in helping to protect and increase curlews in the Upper Thames region.

Message of support from Marjorie Neasham-Glasgow BEM, His Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of Oxfordshire 

“The Curlew Partnership brings together some of Oxfordshire’s best-known charities, working alongside passionately committed volunteers and landowners, all acting together to protect this iconic bird. Our county plays host to 10% of the UK’s breeding Curlew, but their numbers have declined sharply in recent years. Protecting our biodiversity is crucial to Oxfordshire’s economy, and the Lieutenancy is delighted to support this great Oxfordshire partnership in its work.” 

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made