The curlew's scientific name means new moon, after its crescent bill
Curlews probe mud with long, slender bills that curve downward, and their genus name, Numenius, seems to come from the Greek words for new and moon, a nod to that crescent shape. The English name is thought to copy the call of the Eurasian curlew, possibly nudged by an Old French word for messenger.
English writing first records the bird in 1377, in Langland's Piers Plowman. The Scots have their own name for the Eurasian species, whaup. Naming the genus took some untangling: Linnaeus coined Numenius in 1748, then dropped it in his influential 1758 edition and lumped curlews in with woodcocks. Because the official starting date for animal names is 1758, the French scientist Mathurin Jacques Brisson, who used it in 1760, gets the credit.
Curlews and godwits, which look similar but have straight bills, form one of the oldest lines of sandpiper-type waders. A fossil from France around 35 million years old may belong to the curlew genus. Their nearest living relative is the odd upland sandpiper, with yellow legs, a long tail and a shorter, straighter bill. Stone-curlews, despite the name, belong to a different and only distantly related family.
They feed on soft ground, hunting worms and other small invertebrates and sometimes crabs. Most species migrate long distances, so one curlew or another turns up across Europe, Africa, Siberia, the Americas, Southeast Asia and Australasia at different seasons. Geneticists recently split the Hudsonian whimbrel, which breeds across subarctic North America, from its Eurasian counterpart.
Farming has reshaped their fortunes over the past century. Draining marshes has hurt the Eurasian curlew, and by 2019 so few still bred in Ireland that it risked vanishing there, while long-billed curlews in North America have done better near grazed pastures. British numbers are the target of a five-year recovery plan run by the bird charity RSPB.
Source: Curlew
