Peak District: A journey to Yorkshire in search of UK's smallest bird of prey, the merlin

The writer and science communicator was journeying around Britain in search of ten animals and habitats threatened by climate change and a hunt for the merlin had led her to the edge of the Peak District, which the birds are known to inhabit.

“It’s an incredibly feisty bird,” says Sophie, who charts her time in the region in her new book Forget Me Not: Finding the forgotten species of climate-change Britain. “It’s got an amazing personality.

“It has no problem in mobbing much larger birds like eagles and buzzards, and doing anything to protect its prey or its eggs. It’s got bright yellow legs, it’s a beautiful bird. It has this very fast exciting flight, going very low across many areas of the moor.”

“If their prey is at risk of being harmed by these phenomena then that’s going to hurt the merlin. Flooding events can also flush eggs from the nest of a bird of prey. But more concerning with the merlin is what’s going on in the food chain below.

“There’s lots of destabilising events happening…and there’s so few merlin birds to start with. I think in the Peak District there’s at most about 30 breeding pairs, so it really wouldn’t take much at all, a couple of drought events, a couple of serious floods, to totally wipe out that population.”

Though merlin birds can be found across the country, with so few in the region, it is perhaps not surprising that (spoiler alert), Sophie didn’t come across one during her time in the Peak District. “I was a bit annoyed about it first but actually it’s indicative of how difficult they are to find - they are great at camouflaging against the landscape - but also just how few of them there are,” she says. “It was a reminder that this is a bird really on the brink.”

The merlin, she adds, “has been blindsided as a species for too long”. “We need to remember it, stop overlooking it and keep talking about it...After awareness comes understanding and then hopefully we can zoom out on the bigger picture of how we use our land, how we can make areas of the Peak District, for example, a lot more ecologically vibrant because at the moment they are a bit of a desert in terms of ecology.”

In her book, Sophie describes the trips she took to see ten rare native species first-hand, species that could disappear by 2050 if their habitats continue to decline at their current rate. She challenged herself to travel in low-carbon ways, going the length of Britain on foot, by bicycle, in an electric car, by kayak, on cargo ferries and in lots of trains.

Forget Me Not is a clarion call; Sophie wants people to better understand these species and talks to experts to explain more about the problems they face and what can be done for the future.

“I wanted to illustrate how varied climate change is and how it can take multiple forms of attack,” she says. “It can impact species in totally different ways. It could affect one species’ migration, another species’ breeding cycle, another one’s diet.

The book is out now, published by Bloomsbury Wildlife, priced £16.99.