Black lark | Melanocorypha yeltoniensis

Voice

The song recalls a Skylark's but has shorter phrases, a higher pitch and far more grating, buzzing and mimicked elements; it is delivered in bursts rather than in the minutes-long stream. The song flight is the real spectacle: the male climbs on slow deep beats and then glides with the wings held in a high V, harrier-fashion, black against the sky. He also sings standing on an earth clod or a molehill. The call is a hard rolling chirp and a dry chrrt, deeper than a Skylark's. In spring the male carries lumps of dried dung and small stones to the nest and builds them into a low rampart on the windward side.

Identification

A large, very thickset lark with a broad head, a short tail and a heavy pale bill. In spring the male is entirely sooty black, underwing and undertail included, with black legs and a strikingly ivory to pale yellow bill. In fresh autumn plumage broad pale feather fringes cover all that, so the bird looks coarsely scaled; the fringes wear away through the winter and only by April is he uniform black. The female is clearly smaller and quite different: grey-brown, heavily mottled and streaked, with dark underwing coverts, dark legs and no white whatever in wing or tail. Her size and heavy bill give her away.

Confusion species

A black male can only be confused with a Starling, and that has a pointed yellow bill, a short tail and triangular wings — the lark is more compact, walks rather than bustles, and has a thick blunt bill. The problem is the female. Against a Skylark she is bulkier, bigger-headed and far thicker-billed, and she lacks the white outer tail feathers and the white trailing edge to the wing altogether; the underwing is dark, not pale. A female Calandra Lark shows black neck patches, a white trailing edge and white tail sides, and is settled at once. White-winged Lark, which shares the same steppe, always gives itself away with white secondaries and a chestnut shoulder.

Habitat

Flat, grassy and often saline steppe: solonetz and solonchak flats with wormwood and saltbush, hollows around steppe lakes, and short-grazed pasture. It prefers ground with water nearby where the sward stays low and patchily open. In winter the black males stay out on the snow-covered steppe, feeding on seed along stubbles and tracks and breaking the crust with the bill.

Range and movements

Breeds on the steppes between the Don and the Volga — Rostov, Volgograd, Kalmykia, Astrakhan, Saratov and Orenburg — and eastwards across Kazakhstan to the foot of the Altai. The western part of that range lies inside the map area, but the bulk of it lies well beyond, in Kazakhstan. In winter mainly females and young birds wander west to Ukraine, Crimea and Moldova; in severe winters flocks push further into Europe. West of that it is an exceptional vagrant, with a few dozen records for Europe as a whole.

Where and when to look

April and May on the steppe of Kalmykia, around the Manych lakes, or in central Kazakhstan. Drive slowly along a steppe track and look for black dots on the pale, half-snowy or newly green ground; they show up kilometres away. Then wait for the song flight with the wings in a V — that image stays with you. In winter, work the same plains for flocks made up entirely of black males; the grey-brown females are hundreds of kilometres away by then.

Conservation status

Not threatened (LC): a huge range and still millions of birds. The history has been up and down, though. The wholesale ploughing of the steppe for grain in the 1950s and 1960s cost a great deal of breeding ground; after 1991 much of that arable fell fallow again and the species recovered. Pressure is now rising again through the recultivation of that fallow, irrigation and the drying of the saline hollows — and it is precisely the saline steppe that is its core habitat. Numbers are most sensitive along the western edge, in Ukraine and southern Russia.