Montagu's harrier

So this is breaking news.

Um, This is a Montague's Harrier and it is critically endangered, I believe.

It is not doing very well.

It winters in Africa and it breeds in Britain.

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good morning good afternoon good evening welcome to our show number 1106 Last week, we reported that the Montague's Harrier, an endangered hawk, was saved from regional extinction in the UK.

And happily, we have another good news story of the same sort from New Zealand, where a record baby boom has brought the world's heaviest parrot.

Males weigh up to 9 pounds.

And the UK's rarest bird of prey has successfully nested for the second year in a secret location.

The RSPB, that's the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a charity, they say that the male Montagues Harrier, which is known as AU Owl, has bred with two females and reared six chicks across two nests.

now montague harriers they're on a list of the most at-risk birds in the country conservationists have done their best to help them mate and lay eggs to make more of the species they've done this by having very secret safe locations to keep them protected now a montague harrier is a very strange looking bird it looks like a a chicken that's fell into a a strange pot of ink because they've got black and white feathers They look a bit bedraggled.

The hair kind of sticks out in strange directions.

And this month, it concerns some rare bird species, the UK's rarest bird of prey species, and the fact that they've been rearing chicks.

So the RSPB has reported that the UK's rarest bird of prey, the Montague Harrier, is successfully nesting for the second year in a row.

It's really important to sort of stress that sort of second year in a row point.

You know, it's not a one-off.

So the location of the nests is obviously being deliberately kept a secret, but it is known that it's on farmland somewhere in England and it is at the same site where four chicks were raised last year.

So again, pointing to this being a recovery trend and not just a one-off event, which is really good.

So Montague Harriers are ground nesting birds and they are often found in our agricultural fields, but persecution or inadvertent destruction of their nests by farm machinery and perhaps most significantly pesticide use has contributed to their perilously low numbers over recent years.

They were placed on the red list, the UK's red list in 2021, which was reflective of their exceptional rarity and their declining numbers.