A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
corncrake
The corncrake is a secretive bird of tall grass and hay meadows, closer to a rail than to anything you would meet in a field, and it is heard far more often than seen. The male calls through the short summer night with a hard repeated rasp that carries a mile and sounds like a thumbnail run down the teeth of a comb. It winters in Africa and breeds across northern Europe, and it will not cross open ground if it can walk through cover instead.
Etymology
The name is straightforward on both halves. Corn is the older English word for grain of any kind, not maize, and a crake is a bird named for the noise it makes. The scientific name is one of the more enjoyable in the bird world: Crex crex, which is the call itself, written twice.
Notes
The call is produced at a rate of about two rasps a second and is delivered for hours. Males turn while calling, so the sound seems to come from a different direction each time and the bird is famously hard to locate. In the Hebrides and western Ireland, hay cut late and cut from the middle outward gives the young room to walk clear, and that practice is what corncrakes there now depend on.