Skylark Call MP3s
Field-accurate Alauda arvensis song and flight-call recordings for birders, researchers and anyone studying this classic farmland songbird.
Also known as
Recordings (8)
About this species
Around 18 cm in length, the Skylark (Alauda arvensis) is a passerine songbird: streaky brown with a short erectile crest, plain but for white outer tail feathers. It breeds across open cereal fields, grassland and rough pasture.
The male pours out a sustained, rippling song while hanging high overhead, sometimes for minutes on end. It takes small seeds and aquatic invertebrates sieved from the surface and shallow mud. The male climbs almost out of sight on whirring wings, singing without pause before parachuting down. On migration it moves through Greece and the Mediterranean in great numbers, a familiar bird of field, wood and garden.
Legal use
Skylark hunting status is unusually unsettled even within its own traditional stronghold. In France, government decrees periodically authorizing traditional net-and-cage skylark hunting (pantes and matoles) in four southwestern departments (Gironde, Landes, Lot-et-Garonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques) have been repeatedly annulled or suspended by the Conseil d'État — including a definitive May 2024 ruling that the method is non-selective and fails to meet EU Birds Directive exemption criteria — only for the government to re-authorize a fresh round of captures for the 2025-2026 season, which was again suspended by the Conseil d'État shortly after. In practice this means legal hunting access has been intermittent, litigation-driven and reversed multiple times per year rather than settled, and it may well flip again before or during any given season. Elsewhere in the EU the Skylark falls under the general protection regime of the Birds Directive, and it holds no general open hunting season in the UK. Given how fluid this picture is, treat any specific claim of a current open season with caution and verify locally. Please consult our full country-by-country disclaimer, and local hunting authority guidance, before using this call for hunting rather than identification.