Curlew

a shore bird of the snipe family. The curlew is a wading bird of marshy and upland places, where it secures snails, worms, crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, and crayfish. Of North American species, the jack-curlew breeds in British America and winters from the Gulf States to Patagonia. The long-billed curlew, a fine bird two feet high, has a curved bill six inches long. It is called the sickle-bill also. It probes the earth to six inches in search of food. In lighting the wings are lifted gracefully above the back. In Scotland the European curlew is called a whaup. See Snipe

'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call, Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall.--Tennyson, Locksley Hall.