Photo by Paula Machin. 

If it is summer and you are walking down a road in rural Europe, listen for the skylarks in the open fields. You may not see the bird, but you will hear his song: an aria without breath. And if you are lucky enough to spot him through the lens of your binoculars, you will see the bulge of his throat as he rises in the midst of song. He must end soon, you think, but he continues on.

Skylarks, Alauda arvensis, breed throughout Europe in open fields, often in agricultural fields. They weave their nests on the ground under the grass. The male claims his territory using this spectacular song and flight display, sometimes singing for up to an hour without stop, and flying upwards to a thousand feet before gliding down again. The display of this small, streaked-brown bird, inspired the English poet George Meredith to write the poem, “The Lark Ascending.”

In Meredith’s summertime, skylarks filled the air. He walked along the hedges and crossed lush fields where the females sat silent on their nests, warming eggs beneath them, flushing off the nest only at the last minute, and stealthily rising into the air towards their singing mates. But the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds estimates that from 1980s to the early 2000s the population of skylarks in the UK dropped more than 80 percent, some of this attributed to a change in the way cereal fields are farmed. Instead of sowing the fields in the spring, the fields are sown in the winter. In this way the fields grow much too early in the season, leaving less time for the birds to breed. The RSPB attempted an experiment in 1999, adding unsown plots to winter sown fields which leaves a place for the skylarks to carry out a full breeding cycle. This idea has gathered interest in other parts of Europe where skylarks are still threatened. 

Today the skylark population in the UK has increased, but not to the same level as in the 19th century when Meredith, where in almost every field, saw small brown feathered bodies rising towards the sun, singing. One can only imagine this loose-limbed poet tromping through meadows at dawn listening to their birdsongs as the words of his poem came winding into his imagination:

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflow
to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings