I've been a goggle eyed plover for many's the year

With a sinister yellow gaze and legs ‘swoln like those of a gouty man’, the prehistoric-looking stone curlew is nonetheless an endearing little fellow, finds Jack Watkins

- Jack Watkins

THERE are birds that lift the soul with their song and others that delight the eye with their beauty. The stone curlew is not one of them. Poets have been moved to verse by the sound of a nightingale and artists sent scampering off to grab the nearest paintbrush by the grace of a swan, but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been driven to creative ecstasy by Burhinus oedicnemus.

That’s not to say the creature is without oddball appeal. An old name for it in the East Anglian region is the goggle-eyed plover, which captures well its sinister, pale-yellow eyes—a single stare, many centuries ago, was believed capable of curing a person of jaundice. Then there is the curiously shaped body, like a pair of bellows or a squashed barrel, on top of long, gangly legs. Stealthy in its movements a lot of the time, when it scuttles along on these stilt-like limbs, it looks like a 1960s Hollywood special-effects department’s clumsy guess at how a prehistoric bird might have appeared.

If stone curlews appear a bit off-putting— and even eerie—in their portrait photos, they are, of course, harmless, with endearing traits. They possess a repertoire of calls, including a far-carrying curlee wail, most often heard at night. In his later years, the Revd Gilbert White suffered from deafness, but he could still hear the flight calls of stone curlews. It was White, in