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Corn Crake

Corn Crake

Crex crex

Identify the Corn Crake by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

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The Corn Crake is a secretive rail of tall grasslands that breeds across Europe and Asia to western China and migrates to sub-Saharan Africa for the winter. It is more often heard than seen, thanks to the male's loud, rasping “crex-crex” call, delivered mainly at night. It has declined sharply in western Europe due to early mowing and intensive farming, but remains numerous further east.

Did you know?

  • A calling male can be heard up to 1.5 km away and may repeat his call more than 20,000 times in a night.
  • Its call can be imitated by running a card along a comb, often making a hidden male answer.

Voice

Song

About the species

Identification

A medium-sized rail, greyish buff-brown overall with heavy dark spotting on the back. The flanks are greyish with rufous barring, and the wings have rusty patches that show in flight. Identification is helped by its simple, loud, evenly repeated two-syllable rasping call, heard especially at night.

Family

Rallidae

Size

Medium (thrush)

Colours

brown, grey, black

About the habitat

Tall, dense grassland: hay meadows, rough pasture, fallow fields, cereal crops and grassy river floodplains.

Diet

Mainly insects and other invertebrates such as beetles, spiders, worms and snails; also seeds and green plant material, and occasionally small frogs or rodents.

Behaviour

Keeps within dense vegetation and runs rather than flies when disturbed; when flushed it flies low with whirring wings and dangling legs. Males call mostly at night, repeating the rasping call for hours. It nests in a grass-lined hollow on the ground and lays 6–14 eggs; the black, precocial chicks fledge in about five weeks.

Sources

Photo: Alpo Roikola, CC BY 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruisrääkkä.JPG

Sound: Robert Petersen, XC1083485, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://xeno-canto.org/1083485

Text: Wikipedia (English) + FinBIF species descriptions, CC BY-SA 4.0; FinBIF: CC BY 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_crake

See also