An Audience with a Skylark

We heard the skylarks long before we saw them. We had been walking all morning, through woodland then up onto a rise that ran like a spine through the land. It had rained the night before, which had made the chalky clay of the path slippery underfoot. A descent onto an expanse of flat open grassland offered some respite but the hill rising up ahead promised more slip-sliding to come. First, though, a mile or so of flatness. And the skylarks. The sound of one first, the trilling rise and fall of their song so rapid your ears could hardly follow. You registered the sound almost after you had actually heard it.

The air all about was full of their song now, and then we spotted one hovering up ahead, wings flapping madly. We kept walking, and spotted another on the path not far in front of us, a brown smudge against the green of the grass. We kept walking, close enough that we could make out its shape. We kept walking, closer than we thought possible. Close enough that we could distinguish between the different shades of brown on its upper feathers, see its pale undersides.

We stopped and waited, wrapped up in skylark’s call, waiting to see what the one in front of us did. It stayed where it was for a moment, then rose up, hovering, calling above our upraised heads. And the more it moved – the more its wings blurred, the more insistent its call grew – the stiller we became. We were fixed in place, no longer aware of the slope looming ahead, the miles in our legs, the things we had been talking of just moments before.

It was just us and the skylark. We were taken out of ourselves by this tiny bird, and we only returned when a burst of wind swept the skylark onwards. Its white outer feathers flashed as it looped over us and away into the field beyond ours and down out of sight into the grass.

I looked ahead, and behind. The path at our backs stretched into a pale green blur, empty of people. The slopes ahead contained a few tiny figures, slowly descending. No one else had seen. Nor would we, had luck not dictated us being in that place, at that time, held in silent wonder by a skylark.

I call this article An Audience with a Skylark, which I know is pretentious, but it really did feel a bit like an audience. As though we had been granted access to something rarely seen, or a moment rarely felt. The fact that skylarks are on the UK Red List and have seen dramatic population declines in recent years probably adds to this feeling.

Perhaps because of this decline, and their rarity (despite them once being widespread farmland birds) I have come to know skylarks only recently, even though I have grown up in mainly rural areas. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to see that small brown bird and its effortful hovering and know with certainty that it was a skylark. Now, I recognise its distinctive call, its habit of hovering and know that it is a ground-nesting bird, all of which helps with identification.

It took a while to get to this stage. I must have heard skylarks at some point before, but I can only recall having heard them with certainty a year ago. It was on a walk in the Malvern Hills, when the air whirred with their song. It was Easter time, and I was with my family, one of whom commented that you could really hear the skylarks. I had to listen back carefully to their song online afterwards, trying to impress it into my memory.

A couple of months later, I was walking by myself, trying to shake off a lingering bout of covid. I had driven out and away from town, and was walking through some scrubby grassland bordered by woods of old gnarled oaks and beeches. I heard the song again. This time, I saw the birds making it, rising out of scrubby grassland to hover above the land for no reason I could fathom.

Now, nine months after that, on that walk where the muddy hillside caked my boots with clumps of chalky clay, I was able to combine those past experiences and knowledge and in the moment confirm with certainty that what we had seen was a skylark.

What does all this show? It shows, I think, the difficulty that is often involved with identifying birds, whether that is through sight or sound. It takes time to learn to recognise them, involves lots of frustration and trial and error. But the moment when you know, when you are able to see a bird and identify what it is, makes all of that worth it. You find your perception of the natural world has been enhanced, find yourself drawn slightly closer to it. It is almost like being a child who learns a new word, and whose knowing of the world about them is made richer because of this.

I keep thinking about this – the fact that one little bird prompted all of this thought and reflection, brought these words into being. Yet the bird does not know this, is not even able to know of the quiet beautiful power to prompt things in us.

So, keep an eye on the birds around you. Look them up online. Persist. And you will find you that the world opens up to you a little more, and your mind with it.