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NATURE
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NatureÌýoffersÌýa window on global natural history, providing a unique insight into the natural world, the environment, and the magnificent creatures that inhabit it.
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LISTEN AGAIN Ìý30 min |
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| Brett Westwood with two RSPB volunteers in a Skylark plot... © RSPB, 2006 |
The Lark Ascending
The skylark is one of our most well-known birds, celebrated by musicians and poets, and its soaring song-flight is a feature of open country everywhere in the British Isles. But skylark numbers have been plummeting over the last thirty years and we have lost over a million and half pairs from our cornfields and pastures.
In NATURE this week, Brett Westwood traces the history of this extrovert and yet secretive bird with the help of birder and historian Mark Cocker and skylark biologists Paul Donald and Tony Morris from the RSPB.
 While poets such as Shelley and Meredith were extolling the virtues of the lark's song, trade in skylarks for the pot was brisk, with up to 400,000 birds taken every year from the downs of south and east England.
The bird's most recent decline though has nothing to do with eating the birds, but is directly connected with the way we farm our countryside. Brett meets the RSPB researchers who have not only pinpointed the cause of the skylark's demise, but also an ingeniously simple solution to bring it back. |
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RELATED LINKS
: RSPB
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