Spoonbills return to Norfolk Broads for first time in nearly 400 years
Aug 14, 2023
Conservationists are celebrating the return of a long lost breeding species to the Norfolk Broads.
Three fledgling spoonbills have been born, the first chicks known to have hatched in these wetlands for around four hundred years.
The protected birds, named after the shape of their long bills, which they use to scoop up food from mud flats - have nested at Hickling Broad.
All aboard for Hickling Broad, starter up.
As accolades go for a decade or so of hard graft,
this is some endorsement for Norfolk Wildlife Trust,
and it comes from nature itself.
Painstaking management by the team here
at Hickling Broad in Norfolk
has this year produced the result they'd longed for.
Three feet tall, five feet wingspans,
spoonbills breeding this year in the Broads
for the first time in around 400 years.
A telescope reveals three chicks called teaspoons,
because that's just what their beaks look like.
The birds came back in again in June,
done the business, went down on eggs.
A couple of weeks later, we had young spoonbills, chicks.
Teaspoons, no less.
Yeah, the first in the Norfolk Broads
since the mid-17th century.
Seven weeks on, they are out of the nest
and flying around the upper fern.
Spoonbills, filmed here in France.
There's a clue in the name with their remarkable bills
designed to sift snails and shrimps from mudflats.
Hunted to extinction in the UK,
painstaking conservation work
is beginning to reap real benefits,
and they now breed,
but in just a handful of sites across Britain.
We do a combination of allowing natural processes
to happen across the reserve.
We then do sympathetic management.
We try to create a mosaic of various stages
of wetland communities and reed bed structures,
allowing scrub to develop in reed beds
to cater for the increasing egret,
spoonbills and herons.
Right, if you go down to the woods today, this is quite a structure.
60 feet and I hope you'll be impressed with the view.
Reach the top. Oh that is, that's magnificent.
Atop the viewing platform you gain a sense of one of the biggest reed bed areas left in Britain.
But the climate crisis now means these reed beds are hosting species undreamt of a decade ago.
Distant frequent droughts in the Mediterranean is driving birds that we'd normally associate with the Mediterranean North.
So we see here Ibises, Great White Egret, Cattle Egret, Purple Heaven.
These are all birds that 50 years ago we would associate with the Mediterranean.
Human life of course still wafts gently through this remarkable resurgent biosphere,
now celebrating its spoon-billed breakthrough.
And it's far from the only success like this.
It's only a few years ago that another magnificent wetland bird began breeding in this part of East Anglia.
And just up the road recent years, a Mediterranean exotic has settled down to breed in the UK.
Cranes, bigger and even more spectacular than spoon-billed,
also slaughtered to extinction in Britain several centuries ago.
Now back and thriving, Norfolk Stronghold.
71 pairs bred in the UK last year, producing 39 chicks.
A sudden new arrival too, beee-eaters, breeding for the first time in Norfolk just last year.
Outrageous colours, but an ominous climate crisis message perhaps.
50 years ago when I started bird-watching, I never thought I'd hear someone tell me that
bee-eaters are nesting in the UK.
Very exotic and we associate them with the Mediterranean.
We're not clear why bee-eaters are here,
but it seems fairly certain that climate is driving them further north.
So species brought back from extinction,
refugee species fleeing the heat and drought of the climate crisis.
For now, successful conservation in Norfolk is giving them a space.