It was late on Sabbath evening and my little dog was pawing the door to go out. I grabbed his lead and out we trotted, into the thin ‘white night’ typical of Hebridean midsummer, thinned further by waxing, gibbous moon.
And there it boomed. In the meadow just across the road. Rhythmic, insistent and plaintive – a sustained ‘erk-erk, erk-erk’, like someone winding up a rusty alarm clock, as I gawped in incredulity.
In the 18 years I have lived in this village I have never before heard a corncrake – one of Britain’s rarest birds. Endangered and ‘red-listed’. In 2023, just 870 calling males were heard in Scotland – and 405 of them were here in the Western Isles.
I hear one or two every summer. There are certain well-known redoubts on the West Side – near Bragar cemetery; on the Barvas machair – and last Thursday, not for the first time, I heard one grating yards from Scotland’s tallest standing stone at Ballantrushal.
When I was a Shawbost crofter, from 2005 to 2008, two or three came a-courting on my four-acre holding. I even, like many locally, cut a deal with the RSPB. For delayed mowing, and responsible grazing, I received a three-figure cheque every autumn and the charity also paid for new fencing.
But not since 1978 have I heard a corncrake this close to Stornoway. We are not half an hour’s manly stride from the town centre and there he is, launching into his aria around midnight; maintaining that grating call till about 3am – until a lady corncrake, thus wooed, turns up to show a bit of ankle.
Not everyone, mind you, thrills to a sound associated since time immemorial with harvests past. ‘We had one outside our house several years ago’, wails an old Harris friend who runs a bed-and-breakfast. ‘It made the most dreadful noise, 24 hours a day, every day. We couldn’t sleep. Our guests couldn’t sleep. Attempts to find the elusive fellow were to no avail. Despite several attempts by robust Scalpay fishermen to find and chase him away, the bird remained invisible and constant…’
The corncrake was once pathetically common. As late as Edwardian times they bred in practically every county from Shetland to Sussex.
In 2023, just 870 calling male concrakes were heard in Scotland
Lord Cockburn, that Edinburgh man of letters, fondly remembered the grating chorus from fields shortly obliterated by the New Town. As late as 1898, a corncrake was recorded on Hampstead Heath.
Mrs Beeton, no less, even had a recipe for them. Three or four birds roasted on a skewer with butter and breadcrumbs. The liver, apparently, was a particular dainty.
Today they are found only in the Hebrides, and in scant pockets of the North-West mainland: Coigach, Assynt and Durness.
Their last Northern Irish toehold is Rathlin Island. And there are scarcely any corncrakes in England, though a 2024 bid to reintroduce them to the Norfolk fens seems tenuously to have succeeded.
The statistics emphasise ‘calling males’ because the bird is extraordinarily shy, loath to leave the cover of nettles, flag iris or standing corn. Few ever get to see one. It doesn’t even like to fly during its summer sojourn – rather, the corncrake scurries – and its appearance is wholly unremarkable.
No bigger than a common blackbird, its nearest avian kin are the coot and the moorhen. Its drab livery the perfect camouflage for our pastures.
It has the anonymous air of an aged governess, in her dull little car, dropping by some frightfully posh school to check up on a former charge.
But corncrakes can be remarkably trusting. One overwintering bird in the Uists was happily accepted in someone’s chicken coop, running in and out daily with the hens. Another, on Barra, would enter the crofthouse for a daily feed.
On no account, though, underrate the grit of this little country gentleman. That lad across the road has flown all the way from winter lodgings in Congo or Tanzania.
Flapped, without respite or pitstop, over the Sahara desert. Soared high to dodge the Atlas Mountains. Eluded the quail-netters of Egypt – who, sadly, account for a great many corncrakes – and, after those thousands of miles, alighted on the 7 Marybank lot for some determined wenching.
Corncrakes are not long-lived birds: typically, two or three years. Being spared and well, they will rear two broods each summer, though their young are swiftly left to their own devices.
Their great enemy? The mechanical mower. The first horsedrawn machines were bad enough; those in the tow today of a Massey Ferguson more murderous still.
Frightened, a corncrake will not run to the margins of a field, but to its centre; nor will a female abandon her clutch of eggs. As corn or hay are duly felled in ever-decreasing circles, they stand scant chance.
Shawbost on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis
They have hung on as successfully as they have in the Hebrides because of our unique crofting agriculture. Even in the Seventies, most hay was mown by scythe; most corn by sickle. Neighbours would converge to do one croft at a time, in the communal endeavour the Irish call a meitheal. The birds had ample opportunity to escape.
Traditional patterns of grazing also survive. Cattle are overwintered on the coastal machair, but from mid-May driven to the hill.
Sheep, these days, tend to live on the bye-land – the pasture surrounding the crofthouse. So there is abundant ground, cropped hard over the winter, with fresh new plant-cover sprouting as your corncrake makes landfall from Africa and mops its little brow.
In return for RSPB gold, I undertook not to mow till September. In fact, I usually borrowed someone’s cows for a bit, and, by December, someone’s sheep. Accordingly, I was soon the proud host of several corncrakes.
There is so much about this gutsy little bird we do not know. And some marvellous aspects. For one, their skills in migration are innate, not learned. Corncrakes bred ten generations in captivity have, on release, made majestically for Africa. And returned.
And so many sights, scents and sounds of Hebridean summers past are now long gone. The be-scarved grandmother handmilking the cow into a pail. The howl of the hoist on the first, sideloading car ferries. Kitchens aromatic with peatsmoke.
Bees are not in anything like the numbers they were; even the glorious wail of Gaelic psalm is, increasingly, something you only hear at the odd funeral.
Yet, this summer – just this once – the corncrake calls in Marybank.