Spoonbill breeding success in Yorkshire with nine 'teaspoons' fledging so far this year

But it looks like RSPB Fairburn Ings – a site once notorious as Europe’s largest spoilheap – has everything a spoonbill could wish for.

So far this year nine chicks – nicknamed “teaspoons” by reserve staff - have fledged from five pairs.

Now all eyes are on a final nest to see what the grand total will be.

Previously the highest number to fledge was 13 in 2022.

From a vantage point, using binoculars, you can catch glimpses of the brilliant white birds – the collective name for them is a runcible - in their nests on a stand of willows, in the middle of a shallow flash on the river Aire floodplain.

No one can say for sure why the birds have come here, but there’s a large heronry at Fairburn Ings and lots of nesting cormorants.

Spoonbills like to nest where there’s safety in numbers, and they will “plonk themselves right in the middle if the habitat is right”.

Climate change is also thought to be a factor, with some of their Mediterranean wetland haunts getting dried out in extremely hot summers.

From RSPB Fairburn Ings, there’s a variety of locations they can fly to, down the Aire or to the Humber, where they will use their bills to sweep from side to side to catch small fish, shrimp and invertebrates.

The birds were a familiar sight in the 16th century, but the last nesting spoonbill was recorded in 1668 as draining of the East Anglian Fens and hunting drove them to extinction. They were killed for their beautiful feathers and their meat was enjoyed at medieval banquets.

They didn’t breed successfully in the UK for 300 years, and it wasn’t until 2010 the first regular colony of breeding spoonbills established itself at Holkham nature reserve, in Norfolk.

Now they are breeding at multiple sites across the UK, including this year for the first time at RSPB Ouse Washes in Cambridgeshire.

Karen Swaffield, Warden, RSPB Fairburn Ings, said: “Spoonbills are tremendously exciting to have at RSPB Fairburn Ings and early indications are that they have had yet another successful breeding year.

"We’re thrilled that the spoonbills have now been here for the eight years in a row, and we really hope this means they are here to stay.

“If the last pair which are currently nest-building manage to fledge a chick, we will have had a record year, so we are all on tenterhooks to see what happens next.”

Among the regular visitors to the nature reserve are people who remember the area when they were children and it was a bleak, black wasteland, crawling with dumper trucks with spoil from nearby collieries. Nature has done an incredible job over the years - with the help of the RSPB - with the slag heaps growing over with trees, and large areas of water forming as a result of collapsed mine workings.