num_pages: 101
description: The Slender-billed curlew is one of the world's rarest birds. A beautiful fragile creature it bred in Siberia and wintered in the Mediterranean basin passing through the wetlands and estuaries of Italy Greece the Balkans and central Asia twice a year. Then for mysterious reasons the population crashed. The Slender-billed curlew Now exists as rumour hope unconfirmed sightings and speculation. The only certainty of its story is that it now stands at the brink of extinction.Birds are key environmental indicators - their health or hardship has a message for us about the planet and our future. But we do not know what the fate of the Slender-billed curlew means for us or what happened to it or why.Orison for a Curlew is the story of a journey into that mystery. Following the bird's migratory path takes the award-winning writer Horatio Clare on an odyssey through a fractured Europe to the edges of the land and into the lives of the men and women who have fought to save and preserve the worlds to which the bird belonged.We travel with soldiers beggars students and green superheroes including the father of ornithology in Greece an extinction myth-buster in Romania a Hungarian who invented the Danube delta biosphere reserve and a birdwatcher who drew the preservation map of Bulgaria. This is a story of beauty triumphmystery and struggle and a homage to a creature that may never be seen again.
language: English
title: Orison for a Curlew: In Search of a Bird on the Edge of Extinction
publisher: Little Toller Books