Taxonomy
The rails are a bird family comprising nearly 150 species. Although the origins of the group are lost in antiquity, the largest number of species and the least specialised forms are found in the Old World, suggesting that this family originated there. The taxonomy of the small crakes is complicated, but the closest relative of the Corn Crake is the African Crake, C. egregia, which has sometimes been given its own genus, Crecopsis, but is now more usually placed in Crex. Both species are short-billed brown birds with a preference for grassland rather the wetland habitats typical of rails. Porzana crakes, particularly the Ash-throated Crake (Porzana albicollis) are near relatives of the Crex genus.
The Corn Crake was first described by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae in 1758 as Rallus crex, but was subsequently moved to the genus Crex, created by German naturalist and ornithologist Johann Matthäus Bechstein in 1803, and named Crex pratensis. The earlier use of crex gives it priority over Bechstein's specific name pratensis, and leads to the current name of Crex crex. The binomial name, Crex crex, from the Ancient Greek "κρεξ", is onomatopoeic, referring to the crake's repetitive grating call. The common name was formerly spelt as a single word, "Corncrake", but the official version is now "Corn Crake". The English names refer to the habit of the species of nesting in dry hay or cereal fields, rather than the marshes used by most members of this family.
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