I wake at 5.30am by choice. Low-lit winter mornings are still and sharpening, good for concentration. By March I’m restless for spring’s noise: the dawn chorus of bullfinches, robins, wrens and melodic blackcaps that bring energy to the waking hours.
But on a recent trip to the west of Ireland, I realised I’d been listening to an understudy. My alarm that morning was a virtuoso soloist: a skylark in full ascent, its unbroken song pouring down from above as if soaking the air with melody. The bird itself was just a speck of brown, flapping its wings 12 times a second to keep aloft, unremarkable except for a punkish spike of feathers sticking up from its head – a rebellious upswept crest that raises or lowers depending on whether the bird is alarmed or displaying to females.
The poet George Meredith captured this moment in The Lark Ascending: that “silver chain of sound / Of many links without a break,” the notes arriving so rapidly they flow into a single, sustained song. Watching the bird rise, I understood what Meredith meant: the skylark doesn’t merely sing; in its ascending path, it carries you with it.
A few days later, standing in a bog in Offaly, I heard a skylark again. Not long ago, their song would have filled our skies. In 1900, Irish naturalists RJ Ussher and Robert Warren wrote that “every tract of Irish ground where trees do not grow seems to afford a home for the skylark”. Through the late 20th century, skylarks remained widespread across Ireland. But something changed. By the early 1990s, ornithologists began tracking a distinct decline, particularly during breeding season. Today, the skylark population is down by 30 per cent across Ireland and 60 per cent across the Continent since 1980.
Paul Moore is a tillage farmer in east Cork who remembers, in 1980, skylarks singing on his land. These days, if you visit his part of Cork and ask for skylarks, the answer is simple: they are all but gone.
A seismic shift in farming had sealed the skylark’s fate. Starting in the 1960s, farmers switched from spring-sowed to autumn-sowed cereals, an efficient choice because winter crops grow tall and dense by spring. But a skylark is a ground-nester with short legs, needing bare earth and short grass. The new crops became impenetrable. When the crop grows too tall too early, even one breeding attempt becomes impossible.
A definitive 2012 study concluded that Irish skylarks “almost completely avoid” tillage habitats, preferring grasslands. But modern grassland offers no refuge either: intensive dairying systems fertilise and cut fields every three to six weeks. To a nesting skylark, this is catastrophic: no time for eggs to hatch, no insects for food. The bird was erased from both landscapes.
In June 2022, Moore was standing in a cereal field in Athy, Co Kildare, when he heard at least nine skylarks singing and flying down into wheat and barley crops. He asked the farm’s owner, Andrew Bergin, how long the birds had been there. The answer? “For years.” This shouldn’t have been possible.
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A year later, in 2023, Moore heard skylarks singing in cereal fields at Oakpark in Carlow. He discovered they were concentrated in a barley field subdivided by farm tracks and trial plots, which formed an accidentally diverse landscape where skylarks were using tractor tramlines to access the ground. Moore put the word out, and soon farmers from Dublin, Louth, Offaly and Carlow had confirmed that skylarks were breeding in cereal fields, some for many years.
What had happened? Perhaps skylarks in Ireland had adapted to cereal fields – places which aren’t ideal, but offer something modern grassland no longer could: time. Or perhaps previous research had simply missed them. Either way, Moore had found a puzzle and a potential solution.
In Germany, researchers discovered an elegant intervention: “skylark plots”, bare patches of roughly 16 square meters left in cereal fields, spaced two to four per hectare. The birds use the bare ground to land and move into the crop, where tall vegetation provides nesting cover. The result? Skylark densities increased by 15 per cent. The solution was cheap and simple. Most importantly, it worked.
Moore decided to lead a new project, funded by €7 million of public money from the Department of Agriculture and the National Parks and Wildlife Service. This will involve skylark plots on farms along the south coast from Kinsale to Wexford, where populations persist. The project will run until 2029. “It’s small,” Moore said. “But it’s something we can do now.”
That morning in Mayo, hearing the skylark’s song, I thought about what Meredith wrote at the end of The Lark Ascending: that the bird is “the wine which overflows / To lift us with him as he goes.” We’ve made it hard for the skylark to survive. But thanks to Paul Moore, who remembers when skylarks filled his fields, and refuses to accept their silence – we’re reminded that loss isn’t final. The skylark is waiting; we’re starting to listen.
