Answering the Call (Freagairt na Gairme) review: Sensitive film searches for corncrakes

Answering the Call

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Director: Martin Danneels

Cert: None

Genre: Documentary

Starring: John Carey, Simon Ó Faoláin, Aisling Nic an tSithigh, Thibault Cottineau, Ryan Boswarthick, Vincent Lapeyre, Robert Wasson, Mícheál de Mórdha, Áine Ní Dhubhshláine

Running Time: 1 hr 20 mins

You’ll be waiting a long time to see this movie’s star. As the ecologist John Carey says of Answering the Call’s elusive main attraction: “I want to hear them. I don’t want to see them. If I see them, there’s something wrong.”

Corncrakes live – or, more accurately, hide – in long grass and weeds. They thrived in Ireland when farmers relied on scythes to harvest hay and could spot them or their nests before the blades came down. A similarly themed poem by Siobhán Campbell, published in The Irish Times in 2017, chronicles the “crane-necked” protagonist as rattling “through grass, hoping to mate before meadows are sheared”.

The birds’ distinctive rattle was once welcomed as the harbinger of summer; now it’s a small miracle.

Martin Danneels’s sensitive documentary opens with stark statistics: “In 1970 Ireland had an estimated 6,000 calling male corncrakes. By 2020 there were 150 left.”

Their rarity inspires the Dingle resident Áine Ní Dhubhshláine to light up like a child at Christmas when she hears a corncrake for the first time in 40 years.

This shouldn’t be the case. The distinctive nocturnal sound of corncrakes – typically represented as crex-crex – was once heard all over Ireland. Intensified farming methods have caused the birds to disappear, forcing a gradual retreat westwards.

Danneels journeys to Co Mayo to chronicle the work of Corncrake Life, a community project that brings together farmers, landowners, governments and communities in efforts to increase corncrake numbers.

Five years ago the corncrake was the most endangered bird in western Europe. Practices such as later mowing have increased populations in Donegal, Mayo and Galway.

This is a patient, wise film. We meet Aisling Nic an tSithigh, a farmer using the nitrate-rich dirty wool of mountain sheep to encourage nettle growth; corncrakes favour the tall stinging plants. Thibault Cottineau, an ornithologist, carefully traps, tags and releases the birds from the Wild Atlantic Way to the Republic of Congo.

The cinematographer Joe Edwards finds compelling spectacle in irregular stone walls, curious goats, whispering grass and crashing waves.

In cinemas from Friday, November 13th