ReportingThe 9,000 hectares upstream of Angers are one of its last haunts for corncrake, whose populations are collapsing. Naturalists and farmers are trying to save it and preserve its ecosystem.
But who saw him? In the lower valleys of Anjou, which extend over 9,000 hectares upstream from Angers, along the Mayenne, Sarthe and Loir rivers, blessed are those who have caught a corncrake. At the beginning of June, a counting period, the initiates are asking each other questions: “How many are there this year?” ” This is because the bird is discreet.
30 centimeters high, yellowish brown streaked with black, it is thus camouflaged in the tall grass of the floodplains that border the three rivers. To count it, you have to watch at night the cry of the males in parade, the “singers”, which carries up to several hundred meters. This throaty scraping perfectly imitates its Latin name Crex crex. “Unfortunately, the rail is not beautiful and its song is not wonderful”, apologizes almost Aurélie Dumont, coordinator, for Angers Loire Métropole, of the device Natura 2000, which covers the lower valleys since 2004.
For its reproduction, the rail needs this open landscape, flooded in winter and in which the grasses grow and flower in recession.
If the corncrake does not have the trappings of a biodiversity star, it is nevertheless the center of attention here. These humid agricultural meadows, along which hikers and cyclists circulate in summer, constitute the last hexagonal bastion of the migrant. It breeds there from late spring to early summer, before flying away in September to central Africa.
At the beginning of the XXe century, the species was widespread on almost all the French territory. Reine Dupas, president of the League for the protection of birds (LPO) Anjou knows it well. “My mother was born at the beginning of the 1930s, on an island in the Loire: the song of the rattle rocked her childhood. Twenty years ago, you could still hear them there ”, she remembers. But the destruction of wetlands and agricultural intensification got the better of the singers. In less than half a century, the species has lost 96% of its numbers. The lower Angevin valleys have remained an archipelago, while suffering the hecatomb. Of some 350 rattles in the mid-1980s, there are only about fifty, the largest national workforce, whose cry is watched like a rare melody.
Pike and greylag geese
So that his notes are not lost, a pact has linked for twenty years several actors essential to the survival of the bird: naturalists, hunters, farmers and communities. It was sealed on the Ile Saint-Aubin, in the shape of a heart, north of Angers. To reach its point, you have to go up the old towpath of the Mayenne, in the shade of ash trees. On the left, an egret flies away. Here, right, a rattle? No, the yet sharp ear of Sylvain Chollet, aquatic technician at Angers Loire Métropole, was fooled by the sound of a fishing reel.
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