On the front line to save the corncrake

For many Irish people the call of the corncrake meant the arrival of summer, but the bird has almost disappeared from the island. There's a battle to prevent the decline, but it could go either way, writes GORDON DEEGAN

AT 12.20AM on a summer night on a dirt track overlooking Blacksod Bay, on the Erris Peninsula in northwest Mayo, two men stand silently, rotating 360 degrees with their hands cupped behind their ears. The first goes clockwise, the second anticlockwise. One of the men, Tim Gordon, a contractor with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, comes to a sudden stop and quietly tells his companion, Denis Strong: “I can hear five, maybe six of them.” Welcome to the front line in the battle to save the corncrake from national extinction.

The corncrakes they can hear make up almost 5 per cent of the country’s entire population of calling males, and Gordon admits in the darkness that the future of the bird in Ireland “is on a knife edge”. Known to locals as the Corncrake Man, he is one of a small number of field workers that the State has employed this year to carrying out a census of the bird as part of a new €200,000 corncrake conservation programme.

A survey last year by BirdWatch Ireland found only 127 calling males left in the country; the programme was put in place after the European Court of Justice ruled that the State has neglected its duty to the corncrake.

The programme is running in three phases: the first involves the national census; the second is a €90,000 project to control mink and other predators near nesting corncrakes; and the third proposes to rent fields from farmers where corncrakes live to help ensure their conservation.

Gordon says that, from tens of thousands of corncrakes in Ireland 50 or 60 years ago, the bird is now nowhere to be heard in Ireland apart from a few parts of west Connacht, Co Donegal and the Shannon Callows. So far the news is bad from the Shannon Callows, where only two calling males have been reported. Denis Strong, who is deputy manager of the parks service’s western division, says: “Shannon Callows was a stronghold, but they have taken a big hit and crashed dramatically with the flooding there. Thankfully, here in the west the numbers are doing well. We’re happy that it has stabilised. We have a long way to go to the get the numbers back up.”

Gordon says: “If somebody had said 50 years ago, ‘These corncrakes are dreadful; let’s try to get rid of them,’ you wouldn’t think it would be possible to do it as effectively as we have. Someone from that time would now just hear the silence in the countryside and say, ‘What happened? Did you poison the land? Where are all the corncrakes?’

“The call of the corncrake was the sound of the summer in Ireland from late April to early July. In the space of 50 years, though, the population has gone from between 50,000 and 100,000 to what we have today.”

The fault lies with intensive farming. After migrating back to Ireland from southeast Africa in April of each year, the corncrakes nest in long grass in hay meadows, where they hope to hatch twice over the summer. Since tractors have replaced horse-drawn carts, and fertiliser has made grass grow earlier – grass that is then cut by machine – the corncrake population has collapsed. Gordon has been working to conserve the bird for 16 years. “When I started, in 1994, there were 129 calling males. We are struggling, but we are not letting them go.”

Tender documents from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government underline the struggle. The department admits failure in its €175,000 corncrake-grant scheme to arrest the decline of the bird. The programme pays farmers to help conserve the bird, but according to the department the scheme “has not stabilised the corncrake population and the overall population trend continues down” and that the bird “has suffered a decline almost to extinction” in the Shannon Callows, where the scheme was particularly focused.

Gordon says: “The corncrake is the canary in the coalmine when it comes to conservation. It is telling us that the whole habitat is going. There are very, very few species-rich meadows anywhere in Ireland.”

Farmers are integral to the survival of the corncrake. The department pays them not to cut their grass until the end of its nesting season. “It is working,” says Gordon. “That is what has kept us in it the last 15 years; that is why they haven’t disappeared completely.” Farmers receive €100 per acre not to cut their grass until August 1st and €150 per acre not to cut it until September 1st; they also receive €20 per acre to cut their grass from the centre of a field outwards rather than starting at the edge and working inwards.

One of the 140 farmers in the west who took part in last year’s scheme, and is participating again this year, is Pat Mangan of Carn Hill. A calling male lives less than 20m from his home. “He could start at five in the evening and could go right through to seven in the morning,” he says. “It is great to have them here. It is great that they come back. I welcome the sound, I look forward to it, because next year they may not come back at all.” Another participant is his fellow farmer David McIntyre, who says: “Most people are willing to help and be part of the scheme. I’m involved, and so was my father before me. It is nice to help out and make sure that they don’t become extinct. It is tough enough, too, on farmers, in that you’re delayed mowing.”

McIntyre knows of one corncrake on his land and suspects there is a second. He says the €100-€150 per acre “is probably worth our while in this area, where the farming is not intensive and not a full-time occupation”.

Gordon describes the calling of the male as a very evocative sound. “Every summer I meet people who hear a corncrake and who haven’t heard a corncrake for 20 to 30 years. It brings a tear to their eye. I can’t think of another bird that has that effect. It is a reminder of the past. It is curious: it has a very big draw on people. The sad thing is that there is a generation of kids who don’t have a clue what you are talking about.” Gordon adds that the calling is territorial. “The male corncrakes physically fight on occasion, but their chief means of competing against each other and attracting the female is through their call. Their whole life revolves around it.”

Gordon’s job counting the corncrakes takes him on nightly drives anywhere between Sligo and Connemara, starting at 11pm and going on until 3.30am during the summer. He’ll wind down his window and occasionally stop to listen for their calls, which can carry for more than a kilometre.

Quite often he gets calls to tell him a corncrake is living in a certain area from people who have seen posters asking for information. During a summer census, Gordon says, he would spot two or three corncrakes in fields that he hadn’t known about. He smiles and says: “When that happens it is like Ireland 1, Italy 0, but it doesn’t happen very often.”

The night I accompany him on his corncrake search is part of a 16-hour shift, as Gordon meets farmers during the day, often to ask them not to cut their grass in what is a voluntary conservation scheme. “Everybody who is involved in the project feels the same,” he says. “We are committed to it, we don’t want to let them go and we want to do everything we can to prevent them from becoming extinct here.”

He adds, however, that the State could do more to ensure the bird’s conservation. “The funding is grand in so far as it goes, but with some more we could buy more time for the corncrake. They would do better . . . We know what to do to fix it, and it could be fixed, and it could sustain a population in these areas – much greater than there is now. We know the sort of schemes you need; we know what they are if we had slightly better funding.

He says they need to be able to offer farmers a five-year conservation scheme. “We only ever get funding for the next year for the farmer, and that is very unsatisfactory. He can’t plan ahead. If the corncrake doesn’t show he doesn’t get the grant, and that upsets him. The scheme should be more farsighted.”

Gordon also urges joined-up thinking between the departments of Agriculture and the Environment when it comes to the corncrake’s conservation. “Many in the farming communities are supported by subsidies, but there is nothing to twist the arm of the farmer when it comes to the corncrake, which is a shame.” Is he optimistic about the bird’s survival? “I don’t know which way it is going to go. They are worth fighting for. We could lose them. There are so few: a couple of bad seasons or a couple of wrong moves and we could lose them – and once they are gone they won’t come back.”

Before carrying on into the night with his search for the corncrake he says: “But at the same time we do also know we can keep the numbers and that we can bring them back. It is all to play for, and I don’t know what is going to happen. We can only hope.”