Last call for the corncrake

Surprisingly small and intensely secretive, the increasingly rare corncrake is in serious danger of disappearing from our shores altogether. But not, discovers Vicky Liddell, if a new conservation plan has anything to do with it

- Vicky Liddell

How sweet and pleasant grows the way 
Through summertime again 
While landrails call from day to day 
Amid the grass and grain. 
‘The Landrail’ by John Clare (1793–1864)

When the 19th-century poet John Clare wrote these lines, the rasping rattle of the corncrake (Crex crex) could be heard in every county in the land. The call was so loud and insistent that many country people complained it kept them awake; however, this is not an issue ever voiced now. By the late 1930s, field after field had fallen silent after intensive farming practices destroyed the long grass in which the corncrakes nested. Although some populations have maintained a claw hold in the Western Isles of Scotland—and there are a handful of reintroduced birds in East Anglia—numbers are still diminishing and the corncrake is now more famous for its steep decline than its mesmerising call.