Country Matters: On its back, a rare bird calls out for a mate

It had been more than 20 years after my last remembered hearing in Ring, Co Waterford, of the distinctive, repeated sharp sounds on a still summer night from a meadow overlooking Dungarvan Bay.

There are those, me féin included, who remember when such bird calls could be heard coming from College Park at Trinity or from the grounds of an educational institution in Drumcondra on the north side of the capital.

Last week, a reader informs me, this rare and endangered bird was heard in the expanse of north Mayo where birders can go out of an evening on pilgrimages hopeful of the rare sound of the bird’s presence in the distance after a miracle of migration from Africa seeking a nesting habitat.

It was not always so. Corncrakes were once plentiful and were hunted like game birds for food until ever-developing industrial agricultural practices ended their way of life.

Farm silage-making was not the beginning of the end though.

It all began with the mechanised cutting of meadows more than a century ago when horse-drawn machines replaced hand-cutting by scythes. The mowing machines worked from a field’s edge driving nesting birds before them or leaving imprints of bloody feathers in the grass. The practice of fresh grass silage cutting speeded up the process.

In Mabey and Cocker’s massive tome, Birds Britannica, there is a quote from an Irish source, J Connell in Co Meath. “There were seven or eight corncrakes’ nests in a six-acre field being mown. Not one escaped. Chicks recently hatched and too young to run from danger were butchered wholesale while in a few cases eggs were crushed by the cutter-bar of the mower.”

Over the years, BirdWatch Ireland, the nature charity, has encouraged the introduction of practices in corncrake habitats such as the Shannon Callows, Mayo and Donegal to encourage farmers to defer cutting hay in traditional sites until birds have fledged. There has been quiet success in the work to help this secretive and elusive bird that migrates thousands of miles to breed here.

It appears a most unlikely long-haul traveller — with a cumbersome flight pattern, dangling legs and feeble wing action, it is not easy to imagine it could make such a long journey.

The corncrake’s patient calling routine is amazing. The male bird, well hidden in tall grass and nettle clumps, can keep at it from late evening until 3am, repeating it thousands of times — the sound being heard up to a mile off.

The dangling legs gave rise to a belief that the sound came from rubbing them together as it lay hidden with legs in the air keeping the sky from falling. There is an old saying: “Trean le treun, dhá ghaigín an éin, a cimead an aer go léir, uaidh suas, uaidh suas” — “Strength to the corncrake, two slender legs keeping up the air, up with them, up with them.”

The poor birds are still in need of much help to keep the heavens from falling on them.