No lark to be heard. In general, it is quiet in Niederursel. "I've only heard one blackcap," says Ingolf Grabow as he arrives at the subway station by bicycle. All the way from his apartment in the Roman city? He raises his shoulders: "We have a 'silent spring'." The conservationist refers to the bestseller of the same name by Rachel Carson, a cult book from the sixties.

Claudia Schülke

Freelance writer for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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At that time, it was about the insecticide DDT, which was the undoing of peregrine falcons in America. Today it's all about glyphosate and over-fertilized fields, which, according to conservationists, are putting an end to native field and meadow birds – also in the northwest of Frankfurt, where Grabow and his companions from the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union Germany (NABU) look after a field west of the A5 motorway, parcel 18 or better known as the "Niederurseler Lerchenfeld".

Skylarks do not breed here yet. Last year, too, Grabow only heard passers-by. But: "That's our target species." Franziska Nori, director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein and owner of the parcel, had given notice to her tenants ten years ago in order to return this field with its 7630 square meters to nature.

Grabow cycles ahead there on his e-bike, past the "farm" of the Niederursel anthroposophists and two flowering buckthorns on the canal of the Urselbach - caterpillar food plants for lemon butterflies and blues. He has installed six artificial nests for house martins under one roof in Alt-Niederursel. The birds can no longer find clay to build their nests because the dirt roads between the emerging wheat are paved. Field edges? Not at all. Instead, densely blooming rapeseed, which leaves no room for nests. "And this is where the spraying took place," says Grabow, pointing to the yellow strips of grass under the fruit trees of a plantation.

Letting nature grow

Only shortly before the finish he bumps his bike over an old overgrown dirt road. A hundred metres further on, a steel lark shows what this NABU biotope is intended for: as a so-called lark window for breeding and as a "stepping stone" for passers-by. A pasture fence is intended to keep the dogs away from the dog walkers during the breeding and setting season. A cornerstone, laid by the green space office, marks the boundary to the neighbouring tenant, a Benjes hedge made from the clippings of pollarded willows separates the "lark field" from the dirt road. Grabow has drilled holes in the stumps of a pile of dead wood to promote the settlement of insects, because: "The wood is not yet ripe." Later, he shows "mature wood" framed by nettles. It took ten years to mature. In June, the caterpillars of the peacock's eye and the small fox will cavort on the nettle leaves.

So into it through tall grass and the previous year's stems of the narrow-leaved fireweed. Nature is supposed to take care of itself here. And it does. The green offspring of this pink-flowered bee pasture is already sprouting between the dried parent plants. Grabow proudly points to the young Speierling, which he planted in January 2019. Monika Peukert had grown this seedling from the Berger Rücken. The biologist has also mapped parcel 18. She was able to find a total of 96 vascular plant species in the "lark field", including 25 species of woody plants, 17 planted and eight spontaneously grown, as well as 58 perennial and annual flowering plants and 13 grass species. This is called "species-poor". But where are the seeds supposed to come from in the middle of an agricultural steppe? Only birds and other animals can enter them.