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Wood Lark | Lullula arborea
Boomleeuwerik | Totovía | Heidelerche | חוגת עצים | Alouette lulu
Europe's smallest lark, with a short tail and a distinctive song: a falling, wistful run of flute notes that hangs over a heath at dusk and carries for kilometres.
Voice
The song is a descending series of clear, melancholy flute notes: lu-lu-lu-lu-lu, slow at first, then accelerating and dropping in pitch, alternating with a rolling tloo-ee-tloo-ee-tloo-ee and soft plaintive didloo motifs that die away. It sings in a wide circling song flight up to a hundred metres up, or from a treetop or post, often at dusk and on clear moonlit nights. The season runs from late January into June, peaking in March. The call, usually from birds passing over in October, is a soft, nasal, undulating tit-loo-eet.
Recording: British Library — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Small and compact, with a tail so short that the bird looks almost cut off behind in flight, and broad rounded wings. The long creamy supercilium runs right back to the nape, where it very nearly meets its counterpart from the other side, forming a pale V on the hindneck. On the bend of the wing sits a small but decisive black-and-white block on the primary coverts. Upperparts warm brown and finely streaked, breast cream with crisp dark streaks; the little crest is raised only in excitement. In flight it shows no white outer tail feathers — only small white corners at the tail tip — and no white trailing edge to the wing.
Confusion species
Skylark is larger and much longer-tailed, with obvious white outer tail feathers and a white trailing edge to the wing, and sings a sustained jangle during a song flight lasting minutes, high overhead, rather than a descending whistle. Crested Lark is coarser and sandier, with a genuine spiky crest, buff tail sides and a longer bill. Meadow and Tawny Pipits are slimmer, have a fine pipit bill and lack the black-and-white block on the wing bend.
Habitat
Warm, dry, nutrient-poor ground with a mosaic of bare sand, short turf and scattered trees: heaths, inland dune edges, young conifer plantations, clear-fells, firebreaks, military training areas and woodbanks. In southern Europe also cork oak dehesa, vineyard margins, olive groves and hillsides with low scrub. The nest is on the ground, and the bird needs both bare feeding patches and a raised song post.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
From Iberia and North Africa east to the Urals and Anatolia. In north-west and central Europe a breeder of the sandy soils — heath, inland dune and coastal dune, such as the Veluwe, Drenthe and the Brabant and Limburg heaths — with numbers well up since the 1980s. Most northern birds leave for south-west Europe in October and are back by February; a handful winter. Around the Mediterranean it is resident, in Iberia almost throughout, from dehesa to mountain edge, joined in winter by birds from northern Europe, which makes it one of the commonest birds of open Mediterranean country there.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Late February or early March, half an hour before sunrise, on a heath or inland dune in north-west or central Europe, or in a Castilian dehesa in freezing fog, in calm, lightly frosty weather: the song carries for kilometres and the bird often starts singing in the dark. Dusk in April is the second chance. By day look for it on bare patches along firebreaks, where it walks away quietly rather than flying; then note the short tail and the black-and-white block on the wing bend.
Conservation status
Not threatened (LC) and clearly increasing in western and central Europe since the 1990s, helped by heathland restoration, clear-felling, forest rejuvenation and milder winters, after a deep trough caused by agricultural intensification and heaths growing over. A severe winter can halve the population overnight. The pressures are open sand closing up under nitrogen deposition, ground nests disturbed by loose dogs and recreation, and the loss of the fine-grained mosaic of woodland and bare ground.
Scientific name
Lullula arborea | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Alauda arborea; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Lullula was introduced in 1829 by Kaup. Lullula is onomatopoeic, echoing the song, after the French lulu, Buffon's name for the bird. arborea comes from Latin arbor 'tree', after the trees from which the bird rises to sing. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.