Corn crake

Voice

A hard disyllabic rasp, crex crex, exactly like drawing a thumbnail across a comb, delivered about once a second and sometimes kept up for hours. Only males call, from dusk onward and above all between eleven at night and three in the morning, in May and June. Unlike the other crakes the sound is dry, hard and two-parted, with no trill and no change of pitch.

Identification

Moorhen-sized but ochre to buff, with black-streaked upperparts, a blue-grey supercilium and cheek, and fine rufous bars on the flanks. When you do see one it is usually for a second in flight: legs dangling, neck drooping and, above all, bright chestnut wing coverts, rusty and unmarked. On the ground it creeps hunched through tall grass.

Confusion species

Quail is the only real alternative in the same fields; it is smaller, rounder, lacks rufous wings and has a quite different three-note whistle. Water Rail and Spotted Crake are marsh birds with far darker, streaked plumage and black-and-white barred flanks. The rusty wing patch in flight always settles a Corncrake.

Habitat

Extensive, structured tall grassland cut late in the season: flower-rich hay meadows, river floodplains, damp herbaceous stands of meadowsweet and nettle, and fields of lucerne or cereal. It needs cover about fifty centimetres high that a bird can walk through, with open ground beneath. Early mowing makes a site unusable or lethal.

Range and movements

Breeds from Ireland and France east deep into Russia, the bulk of the population in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and winters in southern Africa. In the Netherlands it is found mainly in the floodplains of the IJssel, Rhine and Waal and in eastern Groningen, in sharply fluctuating numbers. In Spain it is only a scarce migrant.

• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

In June drive slowly along a floodplain dyke or late-cut hay meadow between eleven at night and two in the morning with the window down, stopping every few hundred metres to listen. Stay on the road: the bird will not show anyway and disturbance costs a brood. Song posts shift from night to night.

Conservation status

Steeply declined in western Europe through earlier, mechanised mowing that destroys clutches and chicks, and through drainage of hay meadows. Dutch numbers swing with the amount of late-cut grass available and with influxes from further east. Management agreements that delay mowing and cut from the centre outwards demonstrably help.