Pick up a bunch of keys, preferably a large one. Now shake it vigorously for a couple of seconds. Congratulations. You have just produced a passable imitation of the song of the corn bunting. Not that it would fool any self-respecting corn bunting, even if you could find one. For many years it has been one of our most rapidly declining species. As a young man in the 1950’s I could stand on my doorstep where I lived on the edge of Northampton with a very good chance of hearing one; while a stroll in the nearby countryside would produce three or four singing males, with flocks of up to thirty or more in winter, eagerly gleaning from the weed infested stackyards of the local farms.
So what has caused this catastrophic crash in its numbers? Certainly around here loss of habitat has been a factor. Not long after I made my diary entries a huge sprawling industrial estate spread across the area. I remember that after building got under way I came across a flock of the displaced birds in an area where they were not normally encountered. Of course it was my imagination but the birds did seem to have a dejected, lost-looking air about them. Not long afterwards they had gone, never to return. There have been countless places across the land where the sprawl of towns and cities across green fields has led to the local extinction of whole communities of birds and other wildlife.
Corn buntings have also suffered due to changes in farming practices. Cleaner, weed-free crops has led to food shortages among the adults, whilst pesticide sprays have decimated the insects upon which they feed their young. The large-scale removal of hedgerows means fewer nesting sites, and most importantly the song-posts from which the males advertise their territories to rivals, and broadcast for a mate. Despite being to our ears a poor singer the females think his key-jangling effort are pure bliss!
The corn bunting has always been a widely distributed bird, never common, although by the same token far from rare. I used to see or hear it in dozens of locations within a twenty or so miles radius of where I live. On one memorable occasion about fifteen years ago I counted five of them, strung out along a telephone wire like sparse beads, all jangling away at one another. Today I would need to travel miles to find one, a sad journey if ever there was! The current situation is that corn buntings have declined across most of their European range, but nowhere has the crash been more marked than in Britain.
Compared to we humans, the sex life of the corn bunting seems totally outrageous. A few males have just a single mate, but others are polygamous. Indeed up to a record eighteen females to a single male are known. Yet one of the early enthusiasts who studied it said it was ‘a most boring bird to watch’, spending long periods sitting apparently doing nothing. It occurs to me that I would spend a long time sitting doing nothing if I had eighteen females to look after!