Corncrakes have declined dramatically due to intensive hay cutting and are now almost confined to Scotland, Ireland, and a few English sites where farming practices can be adapted to support them.
Corncrake welfare crises are acute and direct: mechanised hay cutting kills both nesting adults and chicks that cannot escape rapidly moving machinery. The distressing and painful death of birds caught in mowers represents a welfare emergency that occurs annually across thousands of field operations. Adapted cutting practices including cutting from the centre of the field outward — which allows birds to escape to field margins — rather than the conventional perimeter-in approach, combined with late cutting after corncrake chicks fledge, dramatically reduces this welfare harm. Individual farmer decisions about cutting practice thus have direct welfare consequences for individual birds nesting in their fields.