Anyone who lived in rural Ireland up to the early 1960s will remember well the sound of what was then a common and widespread Irish bird, the corncrake. Its distinctive "crax-crax" call kept many a rural dweller awake at night.
However, as farmers became more intensive in their production methods and silage-making replaced haymaking as the main source of winter fodder, the corncrake was in trouble.Now, despite an international effort to conserve its breeding grounds, it is the only Irish breeding bird threatened with global extinction. The call of the corncrake may still be lost here forever.
BirdWatch Ireland, without which the corncrake would probably be extinct already in this country, says that corncrakes are now restricted to three core areas in Ireland - the Shannon Callows, north Donegal and Co Mayo.
Since the 1991 launch of the Corncrake Conservation Project, which is supported by the Department of the Environment and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), there has been only an overall decline in the number of calling males, the best indicator of breeding pairs.
The number of calling males in the Shannon Callows dropped from a recent peak of 69 in 1998 to 54 in 2001. This was despite a scheme whereby farmers are paid to farm in a "corncrake-sensitive" way: they leave their hay-saving until after the breeding season, and cut their meadows from the centre outwards to drive the young birds into the cover of the adjacent plot.
However, two very wet breeding seasons on the Callows plunged numbers down by more than half for each of the last three years. BirdWatch Ireland is slightly encouraged by the fact that numbers there have remained stable at 22 calling males this year.
In north Donegal, however, the numbers this summer rose to 90, an increase of eight on last year. They have been holding their own on Tory Island, still the most important single site for the bird, and there has been a sharp rise in numbers in Inishowen from 5 last year to 18 this year. However, among other factors, the introduction of feral cats to Inisbofin caused numbers there to collapse in 2003, so that the 2002 total tally of 99 calling males for the county remains the recent peak, despite a partial recovery in Inisbofin this year.
In west Connacht this summer the findings were also encouraging - the corncrake even made a return to Clare Island, Co Mayo, after a 25-year absence. There were 33 calling males located in the region, with unconfirmed reports of others. This, says BirdWatch Ireland, compares well with last year's tally of 27 and suggests that the bird is making a comeback in Connacht, though some known sites in Mayo were not occupied.
Those following the fortunes of the corncrake in recent years will know that overall breeding numbers have remained fairly constant after sharp declines continued into the early 1990s. This suggests that BWI's conservation programme is having a positive effect. There were 129 calling males in 1994, 155 in 1999, 131 last year and 145 this year. According to BWI, the relatively small dips and spikes have occasioned "hope and despair in almost equal measure", but the overall balance sheet suggests that the conservation project is working.
Finding an explanation for recent western seaboard increases is not easy because of the complexity of the movement of the bird during its nesting and migratory periods. There have been reports of increased numbers on the Western Isles in Scotland, which could be having a positive "knock-on" effect in Ireland with birds moving from the limited habitats available there.
However, habitat management work by BirdWatch Ireland is producing its own rewards, with corncrakes now turning up in Termoncarragh, Co Mayo, where the organisation manages land for corncrakes and other endangered species in a project supported by the EU LIFE-Nature Fund.
The Corncrake Grant Scheme, supported by the National Parks & Wildlife Service of the Deparment of the Environment and now enshrined in the EU's Rural Environment Protection Scheme may well mean generations to come will be able to hear this elusive, shy visitor from Africa which comes here to breed each year.
Less intensive farming methods will most certainly help the possible recovery of the bird which Irish people once thought overwintered here by turning into frogs and sleeping in wells.
Sean McConnell is Irish Times Agriculture Correspondent
|
