Ireland's threatened corncrakes desperately need open, diverse and life-filled fields
One summer's day a few years ago, I boarded a boat on Magheraroarty pier, on the northwest coast of Donegal, and took off for Tory Island. But the vessel wasn't full of day trippers wanting to visit Ireland's most remote inhabited island; instead, my fellow passengers were of the shaggy, four-legged kind – a small herd of young, female black Galloway cattle, a hardy breed from Scotland accustomed to wind and salt-laden rain.
It had been 25 years since cattle had set foot on Tory, and their return to the island came with one clear purpose: to graze through the thick layers of scutch grass that had taken over the fields. The beneficiary was the corncrake, a bird whose continued existence in Ireland is conservation-dependent and critically reliant on active intervention and management by ecologists, farmers and landowners.
On Tory Island – often called Ireland's 'corncrake capital' – the return of this bird each spring is like the arrival of a headline act with a non-negotiable tour rider. In order for it to successfully breed on the ground, the corncrake's needs are precise: vegetation must reach at least 20 centimetres in height by mid-May, ideally of nettles, meadowsweet, or cow parsley; no mowing or machinery can disturb the field until August; the ground should be moist – but not flooded – and teem with insects; the area must be spacious enough to roam freely, but with a constant opportunity to hide from predators; and no fertiliser or reseeding during the summer is possible.
When we arrived at the pier on Tory, a small group of islanders gathered while the local priest blessed the new bovine residents, before they were led to a nearby field to begin their work in the tangled scutch. These tough, impenetrable fields offer adult corncrakes no room to weave through and few insects on which to feed. For chicks, it's like being trapped in a room crammed wall-to-wall with old furniture – impossible to navigate. Cattle clear out the junk by grazing on the sweet, young shoots, gradually weakening the underground stems, and in doing so, they helps to create an open, diverse and life-filled field that corncrakes so desperately need.
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That day on the island, I heard a corncrake's call. It's a bird of multiple talents: adept at soaring through the air for thousands of kilometres from central and southern Africa to reach here, the corncrake is also good at disappearing into the landscape. But after a bit of time, with almost comic effect, it popped its head above the grass, offering a quick but intense glimpse before vanishing into the ground once more.
In Ralph Sheppard's thoroughly researched and illuminating new book, The Birds of County Donegal: Residents, Regulars and Rarities, he shares a memory from the 1960s when, from his home in east Donegal, he heard the sound of 10 corncrakes in a single night. 'The continuous rasping call of the corncrake may have prevented sleep, but it is sadly missed as an evocative sound of summer,' he writes. Like the nightjar, grey partridge and corn bunting before it, the corncrake would too have disappeared from Donegal were it not for the national conservation efforts to save it, he notes. Extinction is the certain fate of the ring ouzel, or 'mountain blackbird', which is now down to a single bird in the southern uplands of Donegal, and one breeding pair in the North, in what Sheppard says is the 'last gasp in Ireland of this once-familiar songbird'.
It's not all about decline. Visitors such as reed warblers, garganey, little ringed plover and cattle egrets may soon become regular summer breeders in the county. Sheppard speculates that the vagrant ring-necked duck might become the first known colonisation by an American species, having first been spotted in Donegal back in 1984 on Dunfanaghy's New Lake. This lake is a relatively recent addition to Donegal's landscape, having formed just over a century ago. During the first World War, the demand for bedding and feed for horses led to harvesting marram grass from the sand dunes around Sheep Haven Bay and Dunfanaghy. This disturbed the dunes, causing sand to settle and eventually block off the sea, trapping water behind it and creating the lake. Since 1984, 97 sightings of this North American duck species have been recorded in Donegal, including at Lough Fern, Inch and Durnesh Lough and Tory Island.
To stop the decline of vulnerable species and to 'lay out a welcome mat' for new arrivals, Sheppard advocates for changes in how land is managed. On the uplands, replace sheep with grazing cattle, ideally lightweight breeds such as Dexter, Kerry or Galloway. Native grasslands, such as lime-rich coastal machair, should be grazed in winter and managed using low-intensity farming methods. Native woodlands need to be restored; pollution of wetlands need to stop; and nature corridors should form a continuous network to allow species to thrive without becoming isolated. Sheppard emphasises the need to 'let nature decide how to proceed'.
We're very far from yielding to ecological limits and allowing natural processes to shape how we manage land. As a result, the efforts to keep species such as the corncrake from extinction are resource-intensive in the face of pressures. Since 1993, millions of euro of public money has gone into corncrake conservation. On Tory Island, actions such as the grazing Galloways have helped lift numbers from nine calling males in 2020 to 21 last year. The species continues to cling on, just about.
'We just have to learn to recognise and reward benefits that are not yet part of the economy,' Sheppard writes. 'Re-thinking what we mean by 'the economy' will be to the benefit of birds and other wildlife, and also to ourselves. Preserving and encouraging biodiversity in our own small corner is an obligation that we share with every other small corner – if abundant life, human and other, is to remain sustainable'.
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