British wildlife recordings
Alauda arvensis : Skylark - Alaudidae
- Add a note
Log in to add a note at the bottom of this page.
- All notes
- My notes
- Hide notes
- Add to playlist
Log in to add this item to one of your personal lists.
- Add to favourites
Log in to add and display this item in your personal list of favourites on the right hand side of this page.
The British Library Board acknowledges the intellectual property rights of those named as contributors to this recording and the rights of those not identified.
Legal and ethical usage »
Type
sound
Duration
00:00:56
Shelf mark
W1CDR0001377 BD7
Subjects
Birds
Recording date
1960s
Recording locations
OS Grid Reference(303500,565500)
Recordist
Shove, Lawrence
Species
Skylark, Alauda arvensis
Description
This is a recording of the song of the skylark. This heavily-streaked, ground-dwelling brown bird could be described as nondescript, but the wonderful towering song of the skylark is far from it, remaining the quintessential sound of an early British summer. Skylarks are resident birds, remaining in Britain all year around, although northern populations move away from breeding sites in winter. In summer, the skylark chooses open grassland, heath, and coastal marshes which provide a variety of insects, molluscs, and spiders for food. But in winter, they aggregate in communal flocks in arable and stubble fields that are usually devoid of hedges, to feed on the seeds of plants such as nettles and dock. The male's song flight begins low down whilst rising steeply until it hangs high in the air above its territory, and the long, liquid warble can be heard from quite a distance. The nest is a shallow grass-lined depression and in a successful year a pair of skylarks will raise three broods. As recently as the early 1970s this was a common bird but the current estimated breeding population in Britain has plummeted by 50% to 1,100,000 pairs. This huge drop is thought to be a response to a number of changes in modern agricultural practices.
Metadata record: