AT FIRST GLANCE, THE vertiginous farmland overlooking the sea between the Teign Estuary and the seaside town of Torquay in South Devon is an unlikely location for one of Britain’s great conservation success stories. Here at Labrador Bay, the land plunges 120m through fields, scrub and woods. I feel like I’m standing at the top of a giant green rollercoaster.
“Look,” says the RSPB’s Cath Jeffs, pointing to the hedge in front of us. “There’s a nice male here, that’s him calling. Do you see him? Russetty at the sides, olive-green, really pretty. And then you’ve got that black under the chin.”
It’s a cirl bunting, and I soon notice that he’s also got a very handsome black stripe through his eye and lemon-yellow further down on his breast. He is pretty! And suddenly, giving the impression they’ve been here all along, there are cirl buntings everywhere, moving through the hedge and perching high up in a nearby oak tree.
The blousy hedges and weedy arable fields at Labrador Bay are perfect for this species, a relative of the yellowhammer that is at the northern edge of its range here. Once common across the south, changes in farming threw numbers into a
