The male corncrake, very sensibly, doesn't bother trying to make himself heard on a wet and windy night. The summer storm that thrashed my young runner beans must utterly have silenced any temptation to crow by the three proud Crex crex fathers at Killadoon, Doughmakeon and Aghany.
Indeed, given the June we've had, it's a miracle anyone heard the birds in residence at all.
It is, of course, remarkably good news - three calling corncrakes on my doorstep in south-west Mayo, and another three on Inishbofin, out on the horizon. True, we've had a great spring for wet-meadow vegetation - I never remember such great sweeps of yellow iris, the corncrake's favourite early cover - but no one told the birds this as they were leaving south-east Africa in March.
No, the reason has to be more corncrakes and, luckily, there's a good explanation to hand. They bred last year in the same silage field in Aghany (beside Louisburgh) and the farmer then listened sympathetically to Tim Gordon, the Mayo corncrake fieldworker of Birdwatch Ireland, and Sue Callaghan, the local Dúchas conservation warden.
He was happy to mow his silage in a spiral from the centre outwards, enabling Tim and Sue Gordon to scoop up and take to safety no fewer than eight dark and fluffy three-day-old chicks - the whole clutch from the invisible mother. It is reasonable to guess that this year's new males, calling in rushy meadows above the shore, came from this family.
The corncrake-friendly pattern will be repeated this year, and in one of the new fields a farmer will hold off putting in his cattle until the corncrake young are safely fledged.
It is now 10 years since the Corncrake Grants Scheme funded by Dúchas and operated by Birdwatch Ireland began to recompense farmers in the corncrake's remaining "core areas" for putting off mowing until August 1st and/or cutting in a pattern that pushes the young birds outwards to neighbouring ditches and fields.
The payments have scarcely been raised in all that time, and a top payment of €140 per hectare is now scarcely more than a token reward for losing, in some cases, a second cut of silage. That it has worked so well with scores of farmers is a tribute to farm-gate diplomacy and goodwill.
It is 20 years since I first heard of the simple and brilliant idea of inside-out mowing as a way of rescuing corncrake families from the fatal swish of the silage-cutter's blades. The bird's decline has long been a focus of research, now of increasing sophistication.
Early last century, the indefatigable newspaperman and naturalist, Charles Moffat, kept tabs on a corncrake on the top of Ballyhyland Hill, Co Wexford, for four consecutive summers. It never craked by day, but started up about 90 minutes after sunset and continued steadily all night.
From the hill, Moffat could see the flashes of the Tuskar light which, coming regularly every so many crakes, made counting them less wearisome. Once, when he had counted 847, the bird stopped - for the length of one crek-crek - and then went on until dawn.
The first corncrake I've actually seen was in a wheat-field just over my garden fence in Palmerstown, Dublin (now subsumed into the car park of the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre). They were also craking loudly at Tallaght in the 1940s, where a naturalist called Alec Mason rasped a pair of notched sheep's ribs against each other calling male corncrakes out of the grass to challenge a stuffed dummy.
"The results," he wrote, "are perfectly consistent with the view that birds are almost complete automatons, whose reactions to any given set of circumstances, particularly those connected with sexual activities, can be accurately forecasted, provided the external conditions remain the same; and are almost entirely governed by the activity of their endocrine glands, particularly by the state of their gonads."
The elusive, almost ventriloquial call of the mostly-invisible male is still the key to deciding how many corncrakes there are in a given area. From study of radio-tagged birds, ornithologists have worked out a system of counting based on the findings that craking males rarely move more than 280 metres between calling sites, and that they call on about three nights out of four.
The researchers make their count on two nights, separated by one or two weeks, between May 20th and July 10th. A problem arises if a male calls from one place on the first night and another on the second. Is it one bird or two? If the sites are separated by more than 280 metres, it has seemed safe to count two birds.
However, two British scientists, T M Peake and P K McGregor, have tested the system against the distinctive voice-prints of individual corncrakes in the Outer Hebrides.
This greater precision raised the count by up to 30 per cent, and showed that males call on fewer nights than supposed and wander bigger distances to do it.
So we may have a few more corncrakes than we had thought - but still a tiny fraction of those that kept Moffat counting through the night, or Mason rasping his bones. Last year's total of 154 calling males in the three core areas of Donegal, Mayo and the Shannon callows may now have gained a few in the west but lost rather more along the Shannon, where late floods have held the birds away from their breeding sanctuary in the hay-meadows.
The paper by Peake and McGregor is Corncrake Crex crex census estimates: a conservation application of vocal individuality published in Animal Biodiversity and Conservation 24.1, in 2001.