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The Living World

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Intimate encounters and extraordinary observations of wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Living World: Ouzels of the Moor

12/08/2012

Ouzels of the Moor

BBC Radio 4 - Living World, Ouzels of the Moor

Miranda Krestovnikoff visits Dartmoor in search of ring ouzels, the mountain blackbirds.

Miranda Krestovnikoff is in a valley on Dartmoor searching for the last ring ouzels in southern England where an RSPB study of the birds is investigating their decline.

Ring ouzels are birds of wild upland country, migrant thrushes rather like blackbirds with a bold white bib .In fact, ouzel, is an old word for blackbird or thrush.

Unlike blackbirds, these are shy creatures which winter in North Africa and breed in remote craggy places in Wales, the north of England and Scotland, but are nowhere common. In southern England their decline has been sharp, with just a handful of pairs remaining on Dartmoor.

For The Living World, Miranda Krestovnikoff tracks down these elusive birds with the help of naturalist Nick Baker who's been studying the Dartmoor ouzels for the RSPB in an attempt to find out why the birds are in decline.

By late June, some birds have already fledged, but near other nests, the male birds are still singing and both parents are visiting the young. Although singing birds are easy to locate, proving that birds have bred at any particular site is a different matter as Nick admits, and this season has already provided him with some surprises.

Miranda learns that while the birds are declining across the whole of the UK, ornithologists are still uncertain about the reasons. Climate change may be drying up their mountain grasslands, or disturbance and nest predation may be the reasons, but the mysteries surrounding this stunning bird remain to challenge the dedicated teams striving to save it.

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