Something extraordinary began landing across south-western Britain and Ireland in mid-March 2025.<\/p>\n
Then it happened again.<\/p>\n
And again, and again, until birdwatchers across England and Ireland were scrambling for their binoculars at a sight most of them had never witnessed in their lifetimes.<\/p>\n
The bird at the centre of it all looks like it belongs in a dream: a pinkish-brown body, zebra-striped wings<\/strong>, and a crown of feathers it can fan open like a tiny, perfect headdress.<\/p>\n But the real story of this bird is not the one<\/strong> you see when it lands.<\/p>\n A major influx of hoopoes hit Britain and Ireland in spring 2025, with the mass arrival thought to involve the biggest numbers of the species on record for that month.<\/p>\n As many as 80 birds<\/strong> were reported in a single week.<\/p>\n The vast majority clustered in south-western areas, with roughly 25 birds in southern Ireland and 40 between Devon and the Scilly Isles, while the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall hosted the highest concentration of all.<\/p>\n For most people standing in a Cornish field watching one probe the short grass with its curved bill, the first thought was simple wonder.<\/p>\n The second thought was: where did it come from?<\/p>\n Hoopoes do not breed in the UK, but as many as 100 can appear each spring as they overshoot their migration from Africa and land on England’s south coast.<\/p>\n The reasons behind the 2025 influx are not entirely clear, though consistent high pressure<\/strong> is considered a likely factor.<\/p>\n The hoopoe is not new to human imagination.<\/p>\n In ancient Egypt, hoopoes were considered sacred and depicted on the walls of tombs and temples.<\/p>\n They feature in both the Torah and the Quran: in the Quran, a hoopoe serves as an emissary for King Solomon, and the species was later selected as Israel’s national bird<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Found across Africa, Asia and Europe, hoopoes are notable for their distinctive crown of feathers, which can be raised or lowered at will.<\/p>\n That crown is the detail everyone notices first.<\/p>\n In flight, the broad rounded wings display a bold black and white<\/strong> pattern, and the bird’s undulating wingbeats are reminiscent of a large butterfly.<\/p>\n It is a creature that seems designed to be admired from a distance.<\/p>\n Which makes what happens at the nest so surprising.<\/p>\n Before the nest, there is the hunt.<\/p>\n The hoopoe’s long curving bill probes the ground for crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, moths and butterfly larvae.<\/p>\n The bird excels at finding hidden prey by inserting its closed bill and then opening it abruptly<\/strong> underground, a technique called gaping, which forces soil apart to reveal what is buried below.<\/p>\n The Cornwall visitors were photographed doing exactly this, working horse paddocks and coastal lawns like small feathered archaeologists.<\/p>\n The RSPB noted that hoopoes may turn up in gardens, using their bill to probe short grass for insects.<\/p>\n Boreal spring migrants are prone to overshooting their nesting grounds, with more than 50 reaching Great Britain in a typical spring.<\/p>\n The 2025 event dwarfed that average<\/strong>, and nobody was entirely sure why the numbers climbed so high.<\/p>\n Here is where the story of hoopoe birds takes its most astonishing turn.<\/p>\n With its regal crest and exotic wing pattern, the hoopoe looks like something out of a fairytale.<\/p>\n Its nesting habits are a different world entirely.<\/p>\n Hoopoe nests stink. The stench comes from antimicrobial secretions produced inside the female’s uropygial gland, partly shaped by symbiotic bacteria<\/strong> living within it.<\/p>\n During the breeding season, the female and her nestlings rub this foul-smelling liquid into their plumage.<\/p>\n The secretions smell like rotting meat, deter predators and carry antimicrobial properties that lower bacterial contamination on the eggshell surface and have been linked to increased hatching success.<\/p>\n The nestlings add a second line of defence, squirting liquid droppings towards any intruder while emitting a loud, snake-like hiss.<\/p>\n Beauty, it turns out, built its fortress out of something entirely unexpected.<\/p>\n The 2025 event was not just a spectacle.<\/p>\n Hoopoes have been known to breed north of their European range, including in southern England during warm dry summers rich in grasshoppers and soil insects.<\/p>\n The species’ wider decline is driven by forestry changes, loss of nesting cavities from the removal of dead trees, and intensified agricultural use of insecticides.<\/p>\n Research has shown that where cavity trees were lost entirely, a focused nest-box campaign produced a rapid population recovery<\/strong> within just a few years.<\/p>\n That is a rare piece of genuinely hopeful news, proof that the right small action in the right place can bring something remarkable back.<\/p>\n Much like the birds themselves, which crossed an entire sea and landed, completely unannounced, in someone’s back garden in Cornwall.<\/p>\n The hoopoe is a reminder that nature still has the power to astonish, even when we are not looking for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Something extraordinary began landing across south-western Britain and Ireland in mid-March 2025. Then it happened again. And again, and again, until birdwatchers across England and Ireland were scrambling for their binoculars at a sight most of them had never witnessed in their lifetimes. The bird at the centre of it all looks like it belongs … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":25667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"around 80 hoopoes","rank_math_title":"Around 80 hoopoes descended on Britain and Ireland in a single week this spring, and the extraordinary secret hiding inside their nests has nothing to do with their famous looks","rank_math_description":"Over 80 hoopoe birds flooded Cornwall and Ireland in spring 2025. The stunning birds carry a nest secret that will make you rethink nature's most beautiful creatures.","footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The wave that stunned Britain’s birdwatchers<\/h2>\n
A bird that has been famous for thousands of years<\/h2>\n
The forager with a surgical bill<\/h2>\n
The extraordinary secret inside the nest<\/h2>\n
What the influx is telling us<\/h2>\n