Finding The Corn Crake With Eschenbach Binoculars

How to recognize a corn crake? Best with your ears; while the bird is usually hidden in the vegetation, its loud call can be heard from more than a kilometer.

Appearance

The corn crake is about 25 cm long and is as big as a common blackbird, but somewhat heavier. The slender body is gray and brown while the throat and breast are blue-gray. The cheeks and sides of the males also take a blue-gray tint during the breeding season. The flanks are barred with brown and white and the wing coverts are brown.

Distribution and habitat

Corn crakes are found in Eastern Europe (European part of Russia, Belarus) where they are rather common. The distribution area is a broad band spreading from France to the west of China.

This shy bird prefers to live in moist meadows, riverbeds and, more rarely, corn fields. The vegetation needs to be neither too shallow, nor too high, just high enough for the corn crake to hide.

Corn crakes are long-distance migrants. Each year, they travel about 7,000 kilometers to get to their wintering areas in East and South Africa.

Behavior and breeding

They mainly feed on grasshoppers, beetles, ants, dragonflies and flies but also eat snails, earthworms, small frogs and spiders. Corn crakes don’t despise seeds and grains when their usual food source is getting scarcer.

As silent as crakes are outside the breeding season, they are rather noisy between May and June. When the night comes, males form groups and deliver their loud 'krek krek' together to attract the females.

The young hatch from the end of May, but due to the numerous matings, young crakes can still be observed in September. They are fed only briefly by the mother and are able to feed by themselves after two weeks.

The IUCN classifies the corn crake as "not endangered", but there are many opinions. The fact is that early mowing violently destroys many breeding grounds. On intensively used green areas, the grass is usually too short for the cautious corn crake. 

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