These otherworldly birds stopped breeding in Britain centuries ago. Now they’re back

The RSPB regularly gets calls from people who have seen ‘a funny bird’. ‘It’s got a red head and it’s feeding from the bird table.’ ‘That sounds like a goldfinch.’ ‘No, no — it’s standing on the ground and feeding from the bird table…’

Cranes can stand as tall as a man. They became extinct as breeding birds in this country and stayed that way for damn near half a millennium. But astonishingly they’ve come back, and of their own accord. The first pair simply turned up at Horsey Mere in Norfolk, on the north-eastern edge of the Broads, a few decades ago; in 2010, nine pairs produced six young, and now, with an optimism rare in wildlife conservation — and after a successful reintroduction programme on the Somerset Levels — a complex form of population modelling predicts that there will be 275 pairs of breeding cranes in the country in 50 years’ time.

I’ve seen four of them flying over my place in Norfolk: spiralling down and flirting with the idea of landing before changing their minds and rising again with laborious strokes of their great wings, long neck stuck out in front and longer legs trailing behind.

Cranes were once part of the British landscape. Their ancient presence can be traced in place names: Cranworth, Cransford, Tranmere (Modern Swedish ‘trana’ means crane) and many others. There are fossilised crane footprints on the foreshore of the Severn estuary which date back 8,000 years. The Chinese call them the birds of heaven; they’re talking about a different species of crane, but there’s something otherworldly, angelic even, about all of them. Cranes dance, in courtship and other times of excitement, making elaborate gestures with their wings while they bounce on impossible legs, as if the earth were constantly trying and failing to hold on to them.