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About birds

Bird of the Month - Red Kite
Red Kite. Photograph by Amy Lewis
Milvus milvus
amber
1000 pairs (Summer)
20 years 1 months 15 days (Recorded in 2005)
Pasture, open woodland, forest
Scavenger on carrion, small live prey
Find out more about Red Kite

Get the latest bird trends

Go to the BirdTrends area of our site for the latest information on changes in the numbers and breeding performance of the UK's birds.

Latest declines

The birds below are some of the species that have shown recent declines:

Turtle Dove. Photo by Mike Weston

Turtle Dove

Cuckoo. Photo by Edmund Fellowes

Cuckoo

Willow Warbler. Photo by Jill Pakenham

Willow Warbler

Yellowhammer. Photo by Jill Pakenham

Yellowhammer

Learn more about birds from BirdFacts

BirdFacts gives in depth information about all of the 580 species recorded in the wild in Britain. For each bird, BirdFacts provides details of Population and Distribution, Breeding and Survival and Biometrics, along with other fascinating facts.

Search for a bird species on BirdFacts


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Follow our ground-breaking Cuckoo tracking project.

Watch Bird ID Workshop Videos

Swallow. Photograph by Edmund Fellowes
BTO Bird ID - Hirundines and Swift

With their swept back wings and aerial lifestyle hirundines (Swallow, Sand and House Martins) and the similar, but unrelated, Swift often cause ID headaches.

Browse our expanding collection of bird ID workshops on tricky species.

To learn more about bird identification, try one of our training courses.

Taxonomic changes: learn more about the changing order of bird species.