Birds
Lark
Alaudidae · also called larks
A lark is a plain brown bird of open country that does one thing spectacularly: the skylark climbs almost out of sight on fluttering wings and pours out an unbroken stream of song for minutes at a time, simply because flat farmland offers no tree to sing from. It has inspired more poetry than almost any other bird’s single behaviour, and it nests, defencelessly, on the bare ground below.
Overview
Larks are the family Alaudidae, about 90 streaky brown, ground-dwelling songbirds of open grassland, farmland, steppe, and desert across Africa, Europe, and Asia, with only the horned lark reaching North America. They eat seeds for most of the year, switching to insects to feed chicks, and an unusually long, straight hind claw helps them stand and walk on open ground where they rarely if ever perch in a tree.
The rising song
The skylark’s song is delivered almost entirely in flight — a long, continuous climb to well over 100 metres, hovering song, then a fluttering spiral descent — inspiring works from Shelley’s To a Skylark to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. The American meadowlark, despite the name, is not a true lark at all but an unrelated icterid, named by homesick settlers the same way “robin” and “blackbird” were.
Status
Least Concern as a family, but the skylark has declined sharply across Western Europe since the mid-20th century, driven by earlier, denser crop growth and mowing that destroys ground nests, and reduced winter seed and insect supplies from intensive farming.
Lark: common questions
Why does a skylark sing while flying so high?
Singing from high in the open air lets a male skylark's song carry across a wide area of flat, open, often featureless grassland or farmland where there are few if any trees or other elevated perches to sing from, making the sky itself the only real vantage point available. The prolonged climb and hovering song is also thought to signal stamina and fitness to potential mates and rival males, since sustaining continuous flight and song together for several minutes at a stretch takes considerable energy, so the display serves both a practical need for a high perch and a demonstration of the singer's condition.
Is a meadowlark a true lark?
No. The name is a case of mistaken identity carried over from Europe, since meadowlarks belong to the New World family Icteridae, the same family as blackbirds and orioles, and are only distantly related to the true larks of the family Alaudidae. European settlers in the Americas applied the familiar word lark to a bird that occupied similar open grassland habitat and had a broadly similar streaky brown appearance and ground-feeding habits, much as they did with robin and blackbird, without the bird actually being a close relative of the true larks left behind in Europe.
Why do larks nest on the ground instead of in trees?
Larks live in open habitats, grassland, farmland, steppe, and desert, where trees and shrubs suitable for nesting are often scarce or entirely absent, so nesting on the ground is largely a necessity rather than a choice. To compensate for the vulnerability of a ground nest, larks rely heavily on camouflage, since both the sitting adult and the eggs are patterned and coloured to blend closely with surrounding soil and vegetation, and a flushed adult will often perform a distraction display, feigning injury to lure a predator away from the nest, rather than simply flying off and abandoning the site to attention.
Why are skylark numbers declining in places like Britain?
The decline is closely tied to changes in farming practice over the second half of the 20th century. A shift toward autumn-sown cereal crops means fields are already tall and dense by the time skylarks would normally nest in spring, leaving little suitable open, low cover, while more frequent and earlier mechanised mowing and harvesting directly destroys many nests and broods that are attempted. The loss of overwinter stubble fields and fallow ground has also reduced the weed seeds skylarks rely on through the colder months, and reduced insect abundance from pesticide use has made it harder for pairs to find enough food for chicks, combining to drive substantial population declines in intensively farmed regions.