Long before we saw this bird, we heard it near the Sumburgh Head Hotel. It was making this sound, starting out in one lower note and then getting louder and higher, almost as if its sound followed a curve similar to a capital J. It's great that the Cornell Institute of Ornithology now has this sound app where you can try to ID birds through recording their sound. The sound gets translated into sound waves as well, and the app searches the database for what it thinks is the closest sound. In this case, the curlew was easy to identify, and some minutes after we were able to ID the sound, my husband suddenly spotted one on a fence. I ended up seeing several of them before that one, without realising, having photographed birds at a distance without being sure what they were, and they were curlews. And later, when we had some time in Aberdeen on our way back to London, I spotted a handful more of them. They seem to be somewhat prolific in the area. We enjoyed watching them stick their long beaks into the soil/shore and picking out their meal.
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