Skylarks

I led a service high on the border hills this evening, at the stone circle known as Mitchell's Fold, above the village of Priestweston. The song of skylarks was a constant throughout, and a poignant reminder of a sound absent from much lowland farmland these days, which would have been always present in my childhood days. Skylarks have not coped well with increasingly intensive agriculture; while they are by no means the only bird of agricultural land to have declined markedly, they are among the most missed, for their wonderful song from the ascending wing, hailed in poetry and prose.

Why have they declined? They are ground-nesting birds, and at a guess one problem could be that pairs will be attracted to exactly the sort of level green field that will in fact be disturbed by machinery and cut as a growing crop. So their nesting attempts fail. I did still hear skylarks singing when we lived at Llandrinio, perhaps because there was quite a lot of permanent pasture within the farmland there, but even then rarely more than one singing bird at a time. Up above Priestweston there were at least two birds singing; on a recent walk on the Stiperstones there were more than that. It was almost like being a child again.

One of my favourite flowers was liberally scattered over the site at Mitchell's Fold, and that's the little acid-tolerant potentilla known as tormentil. While it has the typical five-fold (cinquefoil) leaf of many potentillas, it is unusual in that the flowers have not five petals, but four.