The skylark strikes back

I’m hoping to pique your interest in little brown jobs. It’s a good time of year for it, as many of them are out and about on the moors and heaths and farmland on Sheffield’s fringes, raising even littler brown jobs in their nests. 

Small, quiet, unassuming brown birds like meadow pipits, reed warblers and whitethroats remain overlooked by most of us, and are given the ‘little brown job’ title by exasperated birdwatchers because they’re so hard to identify for the tick lists in their notebooks. By comparison, our country’s most famous little brown job — the similarly smallish and boringly speckled brown skylark — has been celebrated for centuries by our poets and musicians, not for its looks, but for its spectacular song.

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!” wrote Shelley, while fellow poets Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, Ted Hughes and John Clare all had a go at rendering the skylark artistically. But perhaps the most famous paean to the bird is “The Lark Ascending”, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ post-WWI epic for violin and piano. Williams’ piece was first performed in the 1920s, after the horrors of a conflict that killed over 20 million people, where war poets wrote of French skylarks rising up to the heavens while thousands of soldiers were bombed in their trenches and mown down in the mud. “...in the sky, the larks, still bravely singing, fly scarce heard amid the guns below,” wrote Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae in his famous poem ‘In Flanders Fields’.

Today, we have hundreds of skylarks singing in Sheffield — but maybe not where you’d expect. Unlike many birds, the male skylark will carry its song well into the summer, rising into the sky, singing like mad for up to 20 minutes, sometimes until it’s so high it can hardly be seen. The song marks the bird’s territory to rival males, but can also help distract predators from the nest hidden among tufts of grass below. Given its habitat and its needs, you might expect to see and hear such a spectacle on our western moors — but on the old coalpits of Woodhouse? Rising high above the streets of Darnall? Surely not.

So why has one of the country’s most celebrated rural birds had to change its ways? I spoke to local ornithologists to find out.

Lark descending

A few years ago, the English skylark seemed in mortal peril. By the mid-1990s, the numbers of breeding skylarks here had halved since the six million or so recorded in the ’60s. The decline continued into the new century, but I’m told by several skylark surveyors that numbers have now stabilised and may even be slightly rising. Richard Hill from the Sheffield Bird Study Group is a little more cautious: the group’s work counting areas of ground with breeding skylarks around Sheffield showed a 13% decline between the late 1970s and early 2000s, but the numbers of actual birds may have declined further, he says. A 2km square of land containing 10-15 pairs in the ’70s might only have held a couple of pairs by the ’00s. 

Wendy Birks has surveyed skylarks for Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust and the national British Trust for Ornithology. When I ask her what’s happened, she sighs two words often heard when talking about the national decline in nature: “It’s complicated.”

Despite being one of the nation’s favourite birds, it seems skylarks probably didn’t move into the UK in large numbers until we started cutting down our trees to provide farmland around 3,000 years ago. They evolved on the vast Eurasian steppes, where there were few trees but lots of shrubby grassland. But when our trees started disappearing, many skylarks moved west and swapped the steppes of central Europe for the tufty grass of England. And there they stayed, on small mixed farms. They shared the fields with cattle, and with farmers whose cereal crops grown in the spring would be cut down in autumn and left as stubble over the winter before the season began again.

Skylarks eat seeds and insects, and they need those insects for protein — especially for their growing chicks, which hatch in the spring and live in nests that they hide in shrubby grass, out of sight from crows and kestrels, stoats and weasels and any other hungry predators on the hunt for small brown baby birds.

British farmland used to swarm with insects, and winter stubble fields held seeds that kept farm birds alive until the insects came out again in spring. But the post-war call for farming productivity, followed by European directives to maximise output at all costs, led to the story behind much of the nature depletion cited by the big conservation charities in the national media last week — intensive farming for cheap food has long-term consequences for nature, and for us too when the ecosystem that supports the food we eat begins to fall apart.

A combination of agribusinesses, productivity-led politicians and vast supermarkets had a message: spray your fields with pesticides, fertilise like mad, and grow an extra crop of cereals in the autumn so we can make the nation’s food as cheap as possible. Our farmers complied. The result is a depleted landscape and nature in decline. In a joint statement last week, the heads of the country’s largest conservation charities, the National Trust, the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts and the Woodland Trust, said the nation’s political parties were not doing enough to protect nature, when 81% of UK adults say more needs to be done urgently to protect and restore our threatened wildlife and natural landscapes. 

“The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with one in six species at risk of extinction,” the organisations wrote in their statement, adding that political debate on the subject is rare. "Without action to restore nature to help us adapt to climate change now, future governments will have to grapple with the escalating consequences for all of us, from plummeting food production to property damage from increased flooding.” It was notable that the charities focused on what they believe politicians will understand: economic factors like flooding and food costs rather than the intrinsic value of water voles and butterflies and skylarks in the spring.

Lark adapting

Wildlife can sometimes adapt to this disruption, but you have to give it a chance. For example, Sheffield ecologists and local conservation staff at the Peak District National Trust tell me that recent environmental grants awarded to farmers to set aside pockets of land to benefit skylarks have likely kept breeding numbers up in areas where they might have disappeared under the more intensive schemes of the past. But scientific and lark landscape research is ongoing: skylarks won’t nest anywhere near a tree, as trees contain sparrowhawks and crows and kestrels with a high vantage point to scour the ground for skylark chicks. And the adult skylarks like to see what’s around on the ground too. So leaving strips of grassland between growing crops in the hope of attracting skylarks back may not work, as wily foxes learn that a tramline of grass could well lead to a skylark nest. 

The farmland that skylarks like is untidy and mixed: they can get on alongside some cattle (although too many just means their nests get trampled), and they don’t like sheep-shorn grass — they prefer tussocks to hide their nests. They need plenty of insects around for their young in spring and summer, and seed from grass or stubble in the winter. If they can’t find all that in their traditional farmland homes in the valleys and river plains, they now tend to head uphill, where many of our moors contain the ingredients for happy and productive skylarks, who can have three or four broods of chicks every year when conditions are right (necessary, as many get eaten by those crows, stoats and weasels). 

But Sheffield’s skylarks have found another strategy: like modern planners, they have their eyes on our brownfield sites. Over recent years, the tussocky grass and weeds and insects on old mine workings, industrial sites and abandoned rubbish tips has brought in breeding skylarks who can’t survive and bring up their families in intensive chemical sprayed farmland. The old coal pits at Orgreave, the abandoned industrial sites of Woodhouse and the Shire Brook Valley all have breeding and singing skylarks right now. This is thanks in many ways to work by the city council and local volunteer groups at Shire Brook and Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust at Woodhouse to keep tall trees at bay, restore meadows and grassland, and do their best to persuade owners to keep their dogs on leads in the breeding season.

The latter point is important. A ranger once told me he’d met a dog owner in May on Burbage where Fido had just gambolled back over the moor with a big grin on its face. When the ranger said Fido should be on a lead, the owner replied: “He’s just having fun, he won’t go near the sheep or cattle.” The ground-nesting birds, like skylarks, were overlooked completely, and the ranger later went back to a now empty nest and concluded Fido’s cheery grin was because he’d just gobbled up a handful of lark chicks.

Lark emigrating

So skylarks can be heard (and, if you’re sharp-eyed, seen) on Sheffield moorland like Redmires and the grassy tops at Burbage, and a bit further out at Longshaw and the conservation-minded farmland of Sheffield lakeland. 

But they’re now city dwellers too. They’re at Shire Brook and Woodhouse Washlands, there are still a few around Orgreave despite the new housing developments, and Sheffield Council ecologist Angus Hunter says one of the sites to see skylarks in Sheffield is Seventy Acres Hill. Unlike the idyllic pastoral landscape beloved by John Clare and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Seventy Acres Hill is a patchy piece of tussocky post-industrial grassland between the warehouses and factory yards of Tinsley and Darnall, and Sheffield Parkway. 

The site he’s really got his eyes on for local appreciation of the skylark, though, is Parkwood Springs. He’s hoping the landscapers working on restoring the city’s old landfill site will find places to keep the dogs (and most of the people) out, and curb the national enthusiasm for tree planting.

Then, if we’re lucky, one spring the skylark will rise again above Shirecliffe, and we’ll hear the blithe spirit bravely singing in the sky above the oat milk lattes of Kelham Island.