RAPTORS BRITAIN’S THRIVING BIRDS OF PREY

Few bird sightings have left as lasting an impression on me as my first buzzard, nearly 60 years ago. The bird was spread-eagled on its back in a Cornish farmyard, its legs broken by a pole trap. It was very dead. The farmer, who had trapped it, claimed that buzzards killed his lambs. As an eight-year-old I wasn’t in a position to challenge him but I came home and read everything I could about buzzards. One of the first things I discovered was that buzzards don’t kill lambs – their relatively weak talons and beak aren’t equipped for such a task – but they do like carrion.

I wasn’t able to watch buzzards around my home in Kent as they had been wiped out 150 years before. It wasn’t just Kent that had lost its buzzards; so, too, had every other eastern county. The British Trust for Ornithology’s (BTO) first atlas of breeding birds, based on fieldwork from 1968-72, showed their absence from almost all of lowland England, and there was then no sign