If you were asked to compile a list of birds celebrated in British culture, what would you say? Nightingale, skylark and robin perhaps? Owl or swan, possibly? My guess is that you wouldn’t think of the corncrake, but it’s there, like an occasional faint streak in a stick of rock.
The 19th-century English poet John Clare eulogised the strange and ubiquitous call of the corncrake in The Landrail, while there is a more lascivious Scottish folk song about the meeting of two young lovers on the banks of the River Doon in Ayr, where “the echo mocks the corncrakes among the whinny knowes”. Stanley Baldwin, pillar of the establishment and Prime Minister on three occasions in the 1920s and 30s, described “the corncrake on a dewey morning” as one of the sounds of England, along with “the tinkle
