Witness the greatest avian spectacles in the UK this year with our pick of the RSPB’s most remarkable reserves
by James Lowen
Look out for SpringwatchSee UK wildlife on your screens in May
1 Seabird city Bempton Cliffs, Yorkshire
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds cares for 180 wildlife-rich reserves across the country, but arguably none offers more spectacular views than Bempton Cliffs. Standing tall on the northern flank of Flamborough Head, a vast promontory that presses stubbornly into the North Sea, Bempton’s chalk escarpment plunges 100 metres into raging waves. Even better, between January and October – particularly April to September – narrow ledges on the rockface hold mainland Britain’s mightiest seabird colony.
In 2022, an astonishing 166,576 breeding pairs crammed on to the cliffs between Flamborough and Filey, north of Bempton. In healthy counterpoint to many declining colonies around our coastlines, Yorkshire’s seabird metropolis has expanded by 10% in five years.
These seacliffs are feathered bedlam. Bempton is the sole location in England where gannets nest; our largest seabird can be watched easily from astutely sited platforms along the coastal path. Peering down the seabird skyscraper, you can pick out serried ranks of guillemots, interspersed with plenty of razorbills and puffins, the latter flaunting their jaunty gait, clown-like mascara and colourful beak. All the while, the onomatopoeic calls of kittiwakes – a delicate, globally threatened, ocean-faring gull – echo around the coves.
Even outside the seabird breeding season, there is much to occupy visitors. Bempton and Flamborough are one of Britain’s finest locations to watch migrating birds, from skuas to shrikes.
2 Avalon’s magic marsh Ham Wall, Somerset
Plant it, and they will come. In the mid-1990s, the RSPB took ownership of a peat-extraction site in Somerset, then set about reimagining it as a wetland wonderland. The land was sculpted with machines, then flooded to create open water, before thousands of reeds were planted by hand. Now Ham Wall boasts double the number of reedbed-breeding bitterns than existed in the entire UK in 1997.
The bittern is most readily seen in spring, when females use regular flightpaths as they provision hungry chicks. Spring is also the time to gawp at hobbies – aeronaut fal
