Skylarks vanished from British fields because farmers started sowing in autumn
Pesticides were the obvious suspect when British skylarks declined. The RSPB found the bigger culprit was the calendar. Cereals once sown in spring are now planted in autumn, so by summer the wheat stands too thick for a small ground bird to walk and run between the stems hunting for food.
The Eurasian skylark is an unremarkable-looking bird, 18 to 19 centimetres long, streaky brown above and pale below, with a short crest it can raise at will. Its fame rests on the male's song, a bubbling, unbroken warble poured out while he climbs and hovers 50 to 100 metres up, often just a speck to anyone watching. Songs usually run two or three minutes but can exceed 20 later in the breeding season. Neighbouring males share local dialects that mark who belongs nearby.
Hovering may have shaped the male's body. Males have broader wings than females, possibly because females prefer partners who can sing and hover longest, a sign of good fitness. Near wind farms, males have been recorded singing at higher pitch to cut through turbine noise. Linnaeus named the species in 1758, and its Latin name arvensis simply means of the field.
The female makes a shallow grass-lined scrape well away from hedges and trees and lays three to five eggs, which hatch after 11 days. The chicks leave the nest at eight to ten days, long before they can fly, and hide in the vegetation while both parents keep feeding them; they fly at 18 to 20 days. Losses to predators are heavy, so pairs may raise up to four broods a season. Settlers took skylarks to New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and Vancouver Island, where the small colony peaked at around 1000 birds in 1962.
In Britain, numbers have fallen since the 1970s. Farmers in England are now paid to help, for example by sowing spring cereals and leaving the winter stubble unsprayed, which one ornithology trust compares to giant bird tables. A flock of larks is fancifully called an exaltation, a usage traced to about 1430, and the bird inspired Shelley's To a Skylark.
Source: Eurasian skylark
