Amy's happy-go-lucky moment in Orkneys quest for elusive bird of the summer hay meadows

 

Amy Liptrot - lure of The Orkneys (and corncrakes)

A FORMER  contract warden for the RSPB has revealed that, one summer night, she took all her clothes off and went for a run around a nature reserve.

The incident occurred while Amy Liptrot was monitoring calling  corncrakes in the Orkneys.

Says she: "One still-pink dawn, just before midsummer, I stopped at the Ring of Brogdar on the way home.

"There's no one around, and I took all my clothes off and ran around the Neolithic stone circle."

Amy's account comes in her book, The Outrun (Canongate Books), which won critical acclaim (and the Wainwright Prize) when it was published in 2016.

She compiled it while she was working for the RSPB at the same time as she was recovering from an alcohol addiction that stemmed from her club-going lifestyle while living in London.

In the Orkneys, where she grew up, her nightlife could not have been more different from that in the bright lights of the city.

It involved surveying  every one-kilometre map grid reference square containing suitable corncrake habitat - hay and silage fields and areas of tall vegetation such as nettles or iris.

The Brodgar stone circle on mainland Orkney- setting for exuberance

"Somehow this bird became my thing," she writes. "I changed the ringtone on my phone to a corncrake call.

"Their well-documented decline is undoubtedly down to human activity so it seems right that we should take responsibility to conserve the last few."

The author, who now lives in West Yorkshire with her partner and two sons, admits that, at times, she craved a bottle of wine and is grateful that Orkney has no 24-hour off-licences. She had to make do with a flask of coffee.

Amy also researched the species, noting with dismay that only 30 per cent of the birds that overwintered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo returned to their vanishingly scarce breeding haunts in Britain, some of them trapped and killed in hunters' nets in North Africa.

During her seven week as a surveyor, Amy also delighted in the company of curlews, lapwings, oystercatchers and short-eared owls - known locally as 'catty-faces'. 

She counted a total of 32 calling male corncrakes - one more than had been logged the previous year.

Corncrakes are notoriously hard to see, so did she ever strike lucky?

She writes: "Then, one night, just when I finished my survey, I pulled slowly away in the car and something unexpected happened.

"It's just a moment but it's in the road right in front of me, a  corncrake, running into the grass verge.

"Its image, the pink beak and ginger wing, keep darting through my mind - just a second that confirmed the existence I'd spent months searching for. 

"My first and only corncrake! 

"Usually dawn comes slowly but, tonight, I drive out of a cloud and suddenly it's a new day."

Magical!

Amy Liptrot's prize-winning book