Larksong an abiding sign of life

Another life: The bank holiday people ignored the county council's rather raw-looking new car park behind the strand (space for 93 ice-cream vans) and pressed on, as usual, to the end of the boreen, to park in a glittering huddle at the edge of the sand.

Some, as usual, drove out blithely towards the sea's edge and one, as usual, buried itself down to the bonnet, and was hauled out by a tractor recruited from the nearest farm. Watching through binoculars, I cackled: lazy feckers.

Next morning, waking early, I looked out to a deserted shore and its graffiti of tyre tracks waiting for the next spring tide. I was thinking about the larks. Here's an acre of car park, built with countless lorry loads of limestone, set down in the middle of pasture land where, each June, visiting larks ascend to pour out their little hearts in the hope of pulling a mate. I felt an urgent need to know this courtship was still going on, as usual.

A six-o'clock sun, just clearing the ridge, lit up thickets of fresh yellow flags, the bunting of sheep's wool on the fences, the even whiter white of cotton grass in the boggy patches. A flat, poster-blue Atlantic was utterly quiet for once, so that all the birds of the hillside had the silence to themselves. Their morning chorus wove its echoes back and forth across the fields.

There were some novelties: a grasshopper warbler, whirring away in the goat willow; a sedge warbler, seething and ratcheting somewhere beyond the pink haze of ragged robin. A worried pair of stonechats escorted me part of the way, flying from one fence post to the next.

There used to be a ford in the boreen, where the stream off the mountain crossed the road. It had a little waterfall that lured the odd dipper, and wagtails and sandpipers and a sentinel heron. Sand martins nested in the banks. Now the waterfall has gone and it's a dried-out gulch beneath a bridge so that cars can reach the car park without rattling their axles and getting their tyres wet.

But the skylarks at least are doing all right. Just 20 years ago, I was moved to carol that to walk this stretch of boreen "is to move through a sweet stereophony: a song in each ear". This time was no different: larksong soared across the dunes and coastal fields.

"There was no bird," wrote Katherine Tynan, "only a singing/ Up in the glory, climbing and ringing . . ." But there was, to my delight, a lark in full view and one that surprised me by bursting into song, at first, on the ground - this not in the silvery, vehement cascade of notes that it would pour down from on high; instead, a melodious outpouring, delivered upright from a tussock, that would not have embarrassed a thrush. Then, after a silent, angled take-off, a vertical, trilling ascent to a modest 20m (65ft) or so, for a hovering aria unbroken for two or three minutes. This is about average: the record, at 57 minutes, was timed from an exuberant lark hovering above Yorkshire's Ilkley Moor.

Britain has now lost at least half its skylarks - some say 90 per cent - and Ireland about one-fifth since 1990. One big cause has been the autumn sowing of cereals, harvested the following summer. Then the weeds in the stubble are killed by herbicides leaving no seeds for the larks' seeds in winter. And the dense spring growth of wheat or barley leaves no room for them to nest. Ireland has less tillage, but mowing meadows for silage, often twice in the breeding season, destroys nests on the ground.

Fertiliser grows a uniform sward, and where it is not mowed for silage it is grazed by herds of dairy cattle rotated every few weeks. The bird's "most favourite place to nidify in", says an old book, "is in the impressed footmarks of cattle, made in damp soil, which offers, when hardened by the sun, a sufficient protection for the young."

But that was about a very different, "unimproved" landscape, with smaller herds, mixed farming, a variety of plants and grasses, and far higher populations of insects in the spring. "Every tract of Irish ground where trees do not grow," wrote ornithologist Richard Ussher in 1900, "seems to afford a home for the skylark."

Only in the open, coastal fringes of the west, it seems, does the skylark now enjoy that kind of abundance. Out on my horizon, Inishbofin is a summer stronghold (as it is for the corncrake, another ground-nesting bird).

The birds fly out from the mainland to breed and, a couple of years ago, ornithologist Tim Gordon counted some 60 male larks singing by mid-April above the island's meadows and coastal machair - much the same number recorded by Robin Ruttledge in 1968.

Inishbofin has more and more cars, but no car park. It is waiting for its airstrip, instead.