WHAT TO SPOT
Natural wonders to watch out for this week … Skylark
Every spring comes a sight – and sound – to lift the spirits, and none more so than in this pandemic year. Last weekend, I heard my first skylarks of 2021, singing in the meadows beneath the great gritstone amphitheatre of Stanage Edge in the Peak District, as if serenading the whole valley with their exuberant tune.
“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit,” wrote Percy Shelley of a bird that has inspired centuries of verse. “That from Heaven, or near it/ Pourest thy full heart/ In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
Up and up the skylark goes, rising like a Harrier jump jet while singing like a soprano. The birds can fly vertically to about 1,000ft with their tiny wings pulsing at 10 to 12 beats per second.
Its song, writes the naturalist Stephen Moss in his new book, Skylarks with Rosie, detailing the wonders of spring in his local Somerset patch, is a “rapid jumble of notes that seems to go on forever, even when the bird vanishes into the ether”.
In music, the skylark has influenced everyone from Vaughan Williams to the jazz musician Hoagy Carmichael. As an aside, Carmichael’s 1941 tune, Skylark, performed by Aretha Franklin among various others, also inspired a Buick car of the same name, which was produced for the next 50 years in its own gas-guzzling tribute to the bird’s mellifluous song.
But let us reverse back to the Peak District last weekend, watching the skylarks rise into the clouds as if summoned from above. The bird has a creamy white speckled breast and a small crest on the top of its head that it raises when excited or alarmed.
Skylarks can be found in open countryside all over Britain, although they have fared badly in recent decades due to intensive farming practises. The birds are ground-nesting and require 8-20in of vegetation to breed. As a result, they suffer in over-managed land that does not provide adequate protection.
An overuse of insecticides and weedkillers is also thought to have impacted on their primary food source: insects.
In the face of these increasingly mechanised agricultural practices, skylark numbers fell by 75 per cent between 1972 and 1996, and have continued to decline ever since. This once ubiquitous bird of the countryside is now deemed to be a redlisted species of concern – the highest conservation priority.
There remains hope that skylarks can be saved. Research has discovered that leaving two untended plots of land between 20-30 sq yd in every 2.5 acres of farmland can be of significant benefit to the birds.
Skylarks are gleeful early risers. In early June 1951, Eric Simms, an English ornithologist and sound recordist, noted the timings that individual birds started singing as the dawn chorus spread across the country.
Skylarks greeted the first glimpses of sunrise as it rolled across Britain from north to south: singing at 1.30am in the Cairngorms in the Highlands, 2.27am in Staffordshire and 2.36am in South Wales.
You will be relieved to hear, no doubt, that to hear one of the birds sing, you do not have to be “up with the lark”.
Wait for a spell of early spring sunshine warming the earth from its winter sleep and head out into any open field. There, should you be so fortunate, you will meet a lark ascending.