Efforts to restore wetlands are paying dividends with previously extinct birds

Their return is all the more remarkable as it cam, totally unaided, after an absence of 250 years when a combination of habitat loss and over hunting drove them to extinction.

It began in September 1979 when two cranes arrived at Hickling, Norfolk to be joined a month later by a third bird. They left the following April but only for a few days and have been present ever since. Then in 1982 the unthinkable happened and the first British crane chick since the 16th century was reared to adulthood.

Since then a combination of natural expansion and a reintroduction scheme has seen them breeding at sites over a wide distance including Suffolk, Somerset, peat bogs in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and, in our region, on the vast Humberhead Peatlands reserve on the South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire border. They are also present and have attempted to breed at two other Yorkshire sites.

The common crane is our tallest bird, standing at four feet on long legs and with an elongated neck and drooping curved tail feathers. Adults are mainly grey with a black and white head and patch of red behind the eye.

In flight they trail their legs behind them while their long necks are stretched out in front, unlike grey herons which hold their necks in an S shape The cranes also have a very loud trumpeting call clearly head from overhead

They spend a great deal of their time in fields feeding on a wide variety of invertebrates, plant shoots and seeds.

Some spend the winter here but in Europe many thousands gather in Spain, Portugal and northern Africa, also at Lac du Der near Reims in north west France.

In spring they head north to Scandinavia and some of these birds might also reach our shores while on passage resulting in more Yorkshire sightings.both of our resident birds and migrants. Two have been seen in several places in West and North Yorkshire recently.

They are long lived birds- 20 years or more- but are slow to reproduce laying two eggs at most. So it is important that they are given maximum protection both from predators such as foxes and disturbance from humans if they are to continue to prosper.

Cold northerly winds put a brake on any large scale arrivals of summer migrants but there were more sand martins braving the conditions and the first house martins in South Yorkshire,

There were also more reports of wheatears, also the first little ringed plovers returning to breeding sites.