Secretive corncrakes with a scraping call arrive in the UK this month
Tweet of the Day
An extended version featuring the corncrake
IN APRIL, RARE CORNCRAKES RETURN FROM their wintering grounds in Africa. Once known as land rails, these streaky, moorhen-like birds like to creep through dense meadow vegetation, which makes them infuriatingly difficult to see. But they famously make a racket with a voice that sounds like a piece of wood being moved across the teeth of a comb. Newly arrived males rasp their grating call up to 20,000 times a night, and people used to grumble that they couldn’t sleep. It’s not a complaint you hear often nowadays: corncrake numbers crashed after the Second World War due to agricultural intensification. Just 824 calling males were recorded in 2022 throughout the Outer Hebrides off western Scotland, with around 150 in Ireland. A handful of reintroduced birds can be heard in East Anglia. As the RSPB’s Lee Schofield says in Wild Fell, what corncrakes really need is varied farmland mosaics with “a degree of general untidiness” that allow space for plentiful patches of nettles and other ‘weeds’. This has proved frustratingly hard to achieve, despite years of conservation effort.