Why worry about the corncrake?, you may ask. The world changes constantly around us, and change is not necessarily a case for mourning. Well, says the naturalist, in this case something original is disappearing before our eyes, something that human hands cannot fashion. Something that echoes strangely in the mind of anyone who has heard - especially beginning in childhood - its unmelodious yet haunting cry. The current issue of Wings, quarterly magazine of BirdWatch Ireland, reports that last season was a bad one. The total of singing males, which is the yardstick, was only 148, a drop of almost twenty per cent on the 1996 count.
There were a few encouraging signs. For the first time, numbers were stable on the Shannon Callows (54 singing males). Numbers had fallen in previous years. Donegal and Mayo were down, but poor census weather in May and June could have led to underestimation. Donegal was not considered good with only 77 singing males. Possible contribution to that: the vegetation on Inishbofin had become rank, but would be cut in the coming season.
The magazine goes out of its way to stress that it is not, in the Callows or elsewhere, a case of conservation versus farmers. In the Callows over 85 per cent of those eligible to join, took part in 1997. Corncrake conservation to Wings is "a serious agrienvironmental issue." In Britain many decades ago the Field thought the decline set in after the 1914-18 War, when more land went into permanent pasture and less to corn. The same Field said, oddly, that a few "are held to be resident, particularly in Ireland."
In 1902 Guide to Belfast, Down and Antrim issued by the Belfast naturalists Field Club gave great space to wild life but had this only to say of the corncrake: "A very common summer visitor, but it has several times been taken here in mid-winter." A Lundy islander wrote to the Field explaining that telephone wires caused the scarcity. But they came to Lundy. "Corncrake on toast is not unknown here." This was in 1943. A friend's grandfather claims that on the north side of Belfast in the Twenties, there was a corncrake in nearly every second field around the foot of the circle of hills. Y