John Hewitt has the bird landing in mid-April, "whetting his vice among the upland whins/till the low meadows offer him a home/with grass enough to loiter in secure." That was in the Glens of Antrim and the lines are from Late Spring in his collection The Day of the Corn-crake, published in 1969. We call it corncrake or land rail; there is also a not-so-well-known rail, the water rail. For some reason, to the French the corncrake is the rale des genets, or the rail of the broom - that is, the slender bush with the yellow flowers. Anyway, by whatever name it is known, a regular columnist in the Journal de Geneve, Jean Jacques Marteau, writes of it as the rarest bird in Europe. And, in addition to its odd name in French, it is also known as the king of the quails. It still nests in Switzerland, and the Swiss association for bird protection has launched a programme to protect the species. The bird, he says, has mostly disappeared from its normal habitat - "meadows (and not broom) as far up as 2,000 metres" due to intensive agricultural methods: it's the same everywhere. Marteau reckons that the bird needs grass or other plant cover of 30 centimetres, say a foot, to get around unseen. And, of course, the young cannot escape modern mowing programmes. He says that the bird has almost disappeared from western Europe and is to be found only in some numbers in Russia, on land formerly worked communally and now abandoned; yet even there it is threatened, as scrub takes over the now uncultivated space. He tells his readers to phone the Swiss bird protection organisation if they hear the "crex, crex, crex" call.
Here in Ireland, the word is that the signs are fair enough this season. It may mean little, but old Gilbert White of Selborne in southern England wrote in the 1780s that there weren't as many land rails, or dakerhens as they were locally known, as in earlier days. The bird was "poorly qualified for migration" with its short wings placed so forward and out of the centre of gravity. A French publication in 1996 reckoned that Russia might have 100,000, Ukraine 55,000 and Byelorussia 30,000. All 20 countries of western Europe were given as possibly totalling between 6,500 and 10,000. These figures are for male singing birds, so you can double the numbers of actual bodies. Have you heard one yet? It's the most nostalgic summer sound of all.