Skylark - Cowbar Nature

They have many other folk names: clodhopper, sky flapper, linty white, Our Lady’s Hen and names which are a variant of ‘laverock’ from Old English ‘lawerce’ meaning treason worker. This is based on the lark’s protective strategy of pretending injury or limping away to protect the nest from predators.
The word ‘lark’ is also close to the Middle English word ‘laik’ meaning to play or fool around.
Skylarks can be heard or spotted on Cowbar nearly all year but their songs loudly fill the air from March onwards and tail off around October.
They feed and nest on the ground in the Cowbar grassland and crop fields across Cowbar lane. (These fields are now being farmed using organic methods.) Between April and August they can have three broods of 2-4 chicks (the eggs with an incubation period of only 13 days).
They are so well camouflaged that they can be difficult to spot. They are bigger than sparrows, not as big as starlings. Brown and speckled on top, they have tiny crests of feathers on their heads and you can see flashed of white stripe in tail feathers and wing edges when they fly.
They sing as they fly up into the sky – up to 200metres. The tone of their song is different, depending on whether they are climbing or dropping in flight and an individual bird can have between around 160 and 460 phrases or “syllables” in their song. They also incorporate imitations of other birds, especially curlews, lapwings and redshanks.
You can sometimes see the males fighting as they fly and sing. John Lewis -Stempel, farmer and nature writer, describes them as “little hot balls of feather and bone”.
The skylark is sacred to St Brigid in Ireland. In medieval England, eating skylark was believed to cure throat ailments, in Italy to cure liver disease. Belgian parents gave their children skylarks to eat to make them god-fearing.
Many soldiers during the First World War wrote letters or poetry about the skylarks which persisted in nesting and singing over the trenches and no-man’s-land on the Western Front.
Predators include hedgehogs, stoats, weasels, rats, badgers and foxes as well as the hawks and corvids. Dogs, people, farm machinery and vehicles are all threats to their nests.
They are on the red list for UK conservation. In the last 25 years we have ‘lost’ 1,500,000 PAIRS of larks. Intensive farming methods – especially the switch to frequent mowing for silage and spring sowing instead of autumn – is destroying nests and reducing habitat during the breeding season.
They are now protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 but in the 1800s they were caught in hundreds of thousands and sold to be eaten (the females) and blinded and kept in cages (males). One of the first campaigns of the Society for the Protection of Birds (which became the RSPB in 1904) was to save the skylark from being traded for food and entertainment.
Organic and traditional farming allows the land to support up to five times more skylarks than intensively farmed fields. This is why respecting and protecting the grassland and verges on Cowbar is so important to the skylark.