Do you have skylarks nesting in cereal fields?

The skylark is Ireland’s only resident lark species. In winter it occurs, often in large flocks, in cereal stubble fields and coastal areas. In summer though, it is much rarer.

Skylarks feed and nest on the ground. It is from their habit of taking to the air in spring and summer to display by singing for prolonged periods high over their nesting site that they get their name.

Traditionally, this song would have been heard over grassland fields on summer days but as skylarks need eight or nine weeks to raise their chicks, they rarely nest in intensive grassland anymore, as the management doesn’t allow them time to rear a brood and the sward is so thick they can’t feed on the ground.

In the UK and continental Europe, skylarks will nest in cereal fields but in the largest study on breeding skylarks in Ireland some 20 years ago, it was found that this habit was unknown here and skylarks on Irish farms only nested in extensively managed grassland.

In 2022, I visited a farm in Co Kildare on a farm walk and was surprised to hear skylarks singing and landing in cereal fields during the summer. They would commonly be seen in stubble fields over the winter.

Trial plots

Subsequently, at the Teagasc Oak Park open day in 2023, I heard numerous skylarks singing in the area known as ‘the bull field’. This is where there are many trial plots with spacing between the plots mirroring the wider spacing of the regeneratively farmed crops in Kildare.

The birds were again present in Oak Park in 2024 and several birds were landing in nearby conventionally planted winter cereals.

Skylarks were also found nesting in fields in north Cork and elsewhere in Carlow recently, suggesting the practice is more widespread than realised.

John Spink of Teagasc believes the skylarks in Oak Park have been there for many years.

It raises the question, is this a new development with cereal-nesting birds gradually spreading east? Or have skylarks always nested in crops where there was suitable bare ground, such as in strip tilled fields, where the spacing of the seed rows is wider than conventionally planted crops?

This discovery is of interest for the design of future agri-environment schemes in Ireland as skylark plots, a small area of bare ground in the middle of cereal fields that allows skylarks to feed and nest, are not in any scheme in Ireland.

They are, however, widely adopted elsewhere where they can result in a 60% increase in the population on farmland.

It would be good to hear of any other

farms where skylarks nest in cereal crops.

Email: paulwmoore01@gmail.com.