Country and Coast: Searching the sky for the elusive singer who hits the heights

During a recent visit to the Brecon Beacons in Wales, skylarks filled our sky with their music, while on Bempton Cliffs, the bird sanctuary near Flamborough Head, the songs of skylarks can be heard even above the raucous, never-ending cries of almost quarter of a million seabirds.

There is no doubt the lark's music is enough to overcome most other sounds and although its song does not rate alongside those of the nightingale, blackbird or thrush, it is sufficiently inspiring to attract poets and musicians. The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a composition for violin and orchestra, is one of Britain's most popular pieces of classical music, while many poets have honoured this bird.

Among them, Tennyson referred to its lofty invisibility when he wrote "And drown'd in yonder living blue, the lark becomes a sightless song" while Shakespeare, in his Comedy of Errors, produced the well-known phrase, "Hark! Hark! The lark at heaven's gate sings."

It is the lark's custom of singing aloft that makes it such a difficult character to observe. Fluttering on what is almost a hovering flight, it will rise vertically for several hundred feet into the heavens while continuously singing. Up there, of course, it becomes little more than a black dot and very difficult to see even with binoculars, but as it returns to earth it becomes more visible to the naked eye with its song coming to an end as it approaches the ground.

Back to earth, it is almost as difficult to see against the vegetation because it is small and sombre coloured in its various shades of brown. It nests on the ground which immediately places it and its offspring at risk from predators and so the four or five newly-hatched chicks depend upon their camouflage for safety – it can be up to three weeks before they learn to fly.

However recognisable the skylark's song, the bird itself might be mistaken for its cousin, the rare woodlark or even the much more plentiful meadow pipit. The chances of seeing a woodlark north of the Humber are remote but meadow pipits are birds of open and often elevated spaces such as moors and mountains. Like the skylark, they will sing as they rise into the air and return to earth and although each is a small brown bird, their songs differ considerably. You'd have to hear and see both to appreciate that distinction!

A once-common Yorkshire word for the skylark is "laverock" which comes from the Old Norse "laevirke". It has fallen into disuse although the name might occur on some old farmsteads or houses in isolated places.

CW 19/6/10