Key Change

I’m ten years old and my Dad says “C’mom Son, I’ll take you to a place I know with lots of birds”. We get in the car and it only takes a few minutes until we arrive. My Dad wasn’t wrong. Lapwings displaying everywhere, Grey Partridges, dozens of Yellowhammers, Reed Buntings and a host of other, then common, farmland birds. One flock of birds in particular catches my attention, Corn Buntings; a couple of them were separated from the crowd and sat on wires issuing a familiar ‘jangle of keys’ song. I was spellbound. Keep in mind, this was nothing unusual on a lowland arable farm in the UK, in the 1970s.

Corn Bunting © Jeff Clarke

I returned over 40 years later at roughly the same time of year. I wished I hadn’t. The lane and the farm looked pretty similar, but almost all of the birds were gone. After an extensive search I finally found two Yellowhammers. I felt utterly hollow and depressed.

This story is repeated across almost the whole of the UK. Finding a male Corn Bunting in song is now a noteworthy event, where once it was just a characteristically familiar background noise, today it is silent.

Moving to Flamborough Head has returned Corn Buntings to my life, a powerful reminder of what I’ve been missing. Even here they are struggling in a breeding context, just a few singing males remain. Thankfully, at this time of year, there are flocks of 40+ birds on the winter stubbles near the RSPB Bempton reserve.

Corn Buntings near RSPB Bempton January 2025 © Jeff Clarke

We have always lived with shifting baselines. Nothing is truly static in nature, but today the baseline is shifting profoundly, in ever shortening time periods. I’m not ancient, but I’m old enough to remember when most lowland arable farmland was punctuated by the sound of a jailor's worth of jangling keys.

“Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone”

Joni Mitchell - 1970