Michael Viney: A fresh range of measures to keep our corncrakes alive

They seem such ill-designed fliers, ponderous as little chickens. But as one century-old report put it: “The repeated occurrence of the corncrake several miles from shore – killed striking against [lighthouse] lanterns between 100 and 200 feet above the sea – must satisfy the most sceptical that this species can fly at a high level with great power and velocity.”

The migration of corncrakes some 5,000km from southeast Africa seems at first thought so unlikely that one can fully understand folklore that had the birds changing into moorhens for the winter and back to corncrakes in spring.

Yet here they come again, those we have left, seeking 20cm of cover among the plants we see as weeds. Nettles are among the most likely. As the Farmer’s Journal noted helpfully in January, many farmers have them growing “in old farmyard manure near sheds” and the Corncrake Life project will “happily transplant” them to more welcoming locations.

This is one practical detail in the latest chapter of conservation measures for Ireland’s highly endangered remnants of Crex crex. Among other innovations: fitting flushing bars to tractors to scare the birds away from mowers, thermal imaging drones to find their nests, and high-tech microphones to help locate the ventriloquial males.

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The new drive will cost €5.9 million from the EU Life environment programme, spent over five years to deliver a 20 per cent increase in the corncrake population. Only 188 calling males were recorded across Ireland last summer, itself a small and recent improvement.

All were calling in the western counties and islands, where farmers are offered payments for acting on advice and using help from locally based field officers. They will create new areas of plant cover, follow wildlife-friendly mowing of grass at later dates, and provide refuge areas while their machines are cutting as prescribed, from the middle of the meadow outwards.

The new scheme, launched by Minister of State for Heritage Malcolm Noonan, has the Department of Agriculture as partner. This is hailed by Pippa Hackett, the department's Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity, as "a more co-operative approach to agri-ecology in our landscape". She was pleased to source funding for payments-by-results and scorecards "to help steer and inform farmers as to what is on their lands".

The bird's global migrations embrace 84 countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe

In 2009, agricultural consultants assessed “farmers’ willingness to pay” to conserve the corncrake. Their paper in Biological Conservation was headed “The Crex crex lament” and concluded that “the non-market benefit of corncrake conservation in Ireland may significantly outweigh the costs of existing conservation schemes”.

Costs at that time were limited to little more than payments for later silage mowing in fields with nesting corncrakes, and lacked the ambitious creation and restoration of habitats that marks the new phase.

Major declines

Ireland had shared in major declines of the corncrake in western Europe, mainly due to the farming changes. Ireland reported to EU Life that its corncrake population had dropped by 85 per cent since 1978 and its range had dwindled to the last Atlantic fringe of Connacht.

Billions have already been spent on conservation in western Europe, but the corncrake’s vast breeding range in Russia and Kazakhstan has kept global survival of the species as being “of least concern”. In 2015, BirdLife International estimated one million to 1.5 million pairs in European Russia alone, pushing the species’ global total up to some six million pairs.

The bird’s global migrations embrace 84 countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe, but these are likely to change as climate change burns off vegetation and insects continue to decline.

The EU’s aim to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2020 is still well short of achievement, even with the world’s largest network of protected areas. Its lists of target species are sometimes questioned, both for omitting many endangered species and including others at least need of conservation.

Asked to choose between the corncrake and a threatened obscure or ugly but important insect, the popular (and thus political) priority seems obvious. When a species has such distinctive character and even national cultural significance, its appeal for protection reaches beyond ecology into social history.

The corncrake is hardly a keystone species for its natural ecosystem (though more flowering meadows will support more insects). But it remains a strong thread of cultural identity, biodiversity and tourist appeal, not least among the communities of the Wild Atlantic Way.

Ambitions to spread corncrake-friendly cover further east might, however, face a mixed welcome for the planting of branching nettle roots into weed-free land.