These otherworldly birds stopped breeding in Britain centuries ago. Now they’re back

The RSPB regularly gets calls from people who have seen ‘a funny bird’. ‘It’s got a red head and it’s feeding from the bird table.’ ‘That sounds like a goldfinch.’ ‘No, no — it’s standing on the ground and feeding from the bird table…’

Cranes can stand as tall as a man. They became extinct as breeding birds in this country and stayed that way for damn near half a millennium. But astonishingly they’ve come back, and of their own accord. The first pair simply turned up at Horsey Mere in Norfolk, on the north-eastern edge of the Broads, a few decades ago; in 2010, nine pairs produced six young, and now, with an optimism rare in wildlife conservation — and after a successful reintroduction programme on the Somerset Levels — a complex form of population modelling predicts that there will be 275 pairs of breeding cranes in the country in 50 years’ time.