Skylarking

Last week - just before the unwelcome arrival of a couple of days of snow - I'd started hearing the Skylarks singing high above the local farm fields. 

It's a joyous sound, melodious and complex, and I'm always happy to hear it. Like the first Daffodils, it heralds the arrival of Spring. 

Several Skylarks all singing at once is a glorious sound - it's no wonder the plural chosen for these birds is 'an exultation'.

   

It's sometimes hard to believe that such a tiny bird can generate so much volume. They're only around 15cms long - barely bigger than a sparrow - and even when the sky is clear and blue it's hard to spot them high overhead.  

Our Eurasian Skylark (Alauda arvensis) is a modestly-coloured bird with streaky brown feathers and white sides to its tail. The wings also have a white rear edge that's visible in flight and it has a small crest on its head that can be raised when the bird is excited or alarmed. It is renowned for its ability to fly up or drop vertically at speed. 

According to tradition if the skylark sings on a wet day, the rain will soon dissipate and be followed by dry weather. 

Sadly, its recent and dramatic population decline makes it a Red List species in the UK. They're seed and insect eaters and the use of pesticides and weedkillers to keep monoculture farm fields free of 'weeds' (i.e. the common wild plants that want to grow there) and the insects that feed on them and pollinate them has done the birds no favours.

For centuries, larks have inspired poets and musicians. 

Chaucer wrote in The Knight’s Tale of ‘the bisy lark, messenger of day’. 

Shakespeare mentions them no less than 27 times in 15 different plays. The lark’s song is loathed by Juliet because it signals when she and Romeo must separate. Expressing her dismay, she wishes that the lark and toad had traded their voices. That way, the lark’s voice would not signal Romeo’s departure. Juliet references the lark more than any other Shakespearean character - four times in fact. The lark also features in Sonnet 29: 

'The lark at break of day arising from sullen earth, 

Sings hymns at heaven's gate'. 

And Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McRae, fresh from the horrors of the battlefields of WWI, wrote these lines in his poem, In Flanders Fields: 

'In Flanders fields the poppies blow 

Between the crosses, row on row, 

That mark our place; and in the sky 

The larks, still bravely singing, fly 

Scarce heard amid the guns below’.

They're also the inspiration for two pieces of music that I love. First, there's Ralph Vaughan Williams' beautiful The Lark Ascending:

   

And then there's Skylarking, my favourite album by my favourite band, XTC. It's a quintessentially English album with songs that are all very different from each other but which come together beautifully as a cohesive celebration of love, the countryside and Spring. 

Here's a link to the whole LP. Enjoy.

   

On last note concerns the use of the word 'lark' to mean 'having a laugh, mucking about, or a merry adventure'. Its exact etymology is unknown but it's probably unrelated to the bird. Most linguists believe that it derives from the old English lake/laik, meaning 'to play, frolic, make sport" (c. 1300, from Old Norse leika 'to play').

What larks!