to be seriously threatened on its wintering grounds and may benefit from deforestation, which creates more open habitats. In culture Most rails are secretive wetland birds that have made little cultural impression, but as a formerly common farmland bird with a loud nocturnal call that sometimes led to disturbed sleep for rural dwellers, the corn crake has acquired a variety of folk names and some commemoration in literature. Names The favoured name for this species among naturalists has changed over the years, with "landrail" and variants of "corncrake" being preferred at various times. "Crake gallinule" also had a period of popularity between 1768 and 1813. The originally Older Scots "cornecrake" was popularised by Thomas Bewick, who used this term in his 1797 A History of British Birds. Other Scots names include "corn scrack" and "quailzie"; the latter term, like "king of the quail", "grass quail", the French "roi de caille", and the German "Wachtelkönig" refer to the association with the small gamebird. Another name, "daker", has been variously interpreted as onomatopoeic, or derived from the Old Norse ager-hoene, meaning "cock of the field"; variants include "drake", "drake Hen" and "gorse drake". In literature Corn crakes are the subject of three stanzas of the seventeenth century poet Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House", written in 1651 about the North Yorkshire country estate of Thomas Fairfax. The narrator depicts the scene of a mower cutting the grass, before his "whistling Sithe" unknowingly "carves the Rail". The farmhand draws out the scythe "all bloody from its breast" and "does the stroke detest". It continues with a stanza that demonstrates the problematic nature of the corn crake's nesting habits: Unhappy Birds! What does it boot To build below the Grass' Root; When Lowness is unsafe as Hight, And Chance o'ertakes, what scapeth spight? John Clare, the nineteenth-century English poet based in Northamptonshire, wrote "The Landrail", a semi-comic piece which is primarily about the difficulty of seeing corn crakes – as opposed to hearing them. In the fourth verse he exclaims: "Tis like a fancy everywhere/A sort of living doubt". Clare wrote about corn crakes in his prose works too, and his writings help to clarify the distribution of this rail when it was far more widespread than now. The Finnish poet Eino Leino also wrote about the bird in his poem "Nocturne". The corncrake's song rings in my ears, above the rye a full moon