Zen and the art of corncrake surveillance

ANOTHER LIFE:IN THE RATHER less rained-upon west of Connacht, it has been a modestly good summer for corncrakes.

No fewer than 42 of the birds were rasping their hearts out earlier on, half-a-dozen of them between our front gate and Louisburgh and another six heard in just one night across the sea in the meadows of Inishbofin. Up around Erris and on the Belmullet peninsula were a further 20 birds and Connemara added 11.

It's the eighth season in a row that the corncrakes in the west have been stable or increasing, and, along with those in Co Donegal, they make up this year's national total of about 140. The National Parks and Wildlife Service grants to farmers to delay cutting their silage meadows or mow meadows from the centre outwards has helped the birds' chances of surviving with families intact.

This, in turn, owes much to the vigilance and diplomacy of the BirdWatch Ireland corncrake wardens such as Connacht's Tim Gordon, ready to drive anywhere at the reported crake of an invisible Crex crex.

This mysterious, ventriloquial sound, still lurking in the psyche of most Irish people of a certain age and background, has been a clarion call to rescue the bird from extinction. But how "romantic" has been the effort to conserve a cultural icon?

Corncrake conservation was pioneered in the Hebrides by ornithologists of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), often on land owned by crofters, small farmers with a long and smouldering history of scepticism. "Being labelled 'romantic' in the Hebrides," writes Jamie Lorimer, a research fellow at Oxford University's Centre for the Environment, "implies a desire to freeze crofting in the past and to relegate it behind wild nature."

Initially, as he records, RSPB corncrake wardens, ornithologists mostly sent from England, appealed to the crofters on moral terms - they tried to persuade them that they had an obligation towards the corncrake to ensure its future survival. A later generation, more sensitively chosen, worked harder at gaining acceptance by the crofting communities, a task also eased by the grant scheme that Ireland has followed.

Dr Lorimer takes an interesting slant on behaviour - not of the birds, but of the field researchers, and his recent paper, Counting Corncrakes: The Affective Science of the UK Corncrake Census, will intrigue the professionals at work in conservation. They may need a dictionary, as I did, for jargon words such as "haptic" and "haecceity", employed in his concern with "the emotional energies that underpin the ethics and practices of field sciences".

Ethology used to be the study of animal behaviour in the wild (meerkats, gorillas, and so on), but now it includes the observer along with the observed.

For his own fieldwork, Lorimer followed the activities of the RSPB scientists counting and monitoring the corncrakes. They used tape recordings of crex-crex calls to lure territorial males close enough to pounce on, and other recordings of tractor and mower noises to herd families into traps for radio-tagging.

They needed all their senses to locate and follow birds calling in the dark - "becoming-predator to become-prey", as Lorimer puts it. Several spoke of their work as "hunting", a parallel in skills, or even sublimation of them, long recognised by field ornithologists. But Lorimer probes even deeper into their instinctual relationship with prey.

"One researcher," he records, "explained that he had developed a haptic [ relating to the sense of touch] 'feel' for the ecological rhythms of the species through extended periods of tracking, and was able to recognise individual birds by their idiosyncratic sonic profiles . . . Tracking running corncrakes by following squeaks and static on their radio receivers, [ the scientists] achieve rare moments of proximity and enter into an unprecedented haecceity." (From the Concise Oxford - Haecceity: "the quality of a thing that makes it unique or describable as 'this one' - a term from philosophy").

He tagged along with a researcher called Craig for whom "counting corncrakes was deeply affective. At different times it could be enchanting or even euphoric when, for example, the first corncrake of the season arrived . . . However, corncrake surveillance could also get him down. There was uncertainty, frustration and disappointment, when the wind blew and it rained for three weeks, or an echoing cacophony of corncrake calls defied disaggregation."

How far feelings in the field find their way into final, analytical conclusions, or even the choice of species to study, must matter to conservation. But Lorimer is all for emotional scientists such as Craig.

"Their wonder at the corncrake and their willingness to express this affection distinguishes them from the dispassionate, objective experts that often inhabit their discipline.

"In giving voice to non-humans like the corncrake, while respecting its alterity [ the state of being other], they have the potential to open political space for new forms of of representation, democracy and environmental citizenship."

Corncrakes of the world, unite!