Tag Archives: red listed birds

Many Happy Returns!!

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Spring feels like it is finally here and, thanks to Ryedale Folk Museum, I have discovered that my birthday – 12th of March – which I knew was St. Gregory’s Day, is also known in the folk calendar as Bird Day and is the day that “people started watching for signs of spring returning from our feathered friends – listening out for songbirds, looking for them making their nests. It was also the day that birds were said to choose a mate“. My post today is about the joy many of us feel from observing bird behaviour as the flowers start to bloom and we begin to feel a little warmth from the sun.

Yesterday I drove over to the Dales Countryside Museum to do some more research in the archives for Cherish and I spent all day getting lost in books written in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I found myself following chains of information about the extraordinary people who still speak to us through the centuries because of their extensive knowledge and interest in natural history.

My head is full and I feel inspired and, all the while, the Yorkshire Dales are coming alive with birds as they come out of their winter quietude to fill the air with song. The happiest moments are when I see flocks of waders returning from their winter retreats and most notably the call of the first curlew heard near my studio in Horton-in-Ribblesdale (20th February).

Illustration from the museum’s copy of Keartons’ Nature Pictures Vol 2 (Cassel 1910)

In the second volume of Keartons’ Nature Pictures (Cassel 1910), Richard Kearton says of the curlew ‘for upwards of twenty years I lived and wandered amongst the solitudes of the Yorkshire moors within sound of its noble voice, and I never hear the bird’s thrilling notes without having my soul stirred and my spirits lifted’.

Photo showing a ring ouzel, a flock of golden plover, skylark, lapwing, curlew and a pair of dippers. Photos taken by Hester Cox.
Photos of birds I’ve seen in the last month. The ring ouzel is from last year because this year’s photo was terrible (I hope to get some better ones)

It is a lovely thing to be completely on your own and yet find yourself exclaiming aloud with joy at the song of the skylark or the sight of a flock of returning waders. One of my highlights from the last few weeks was on 8th March when I decided to have a run up Plover Hill and Pen-y-Ghent to see if the golden plover had returned and on the way I detoured for a quick look at Hull Pot:

It was an overcast and unpromising day but as I looked to see if anything was in it, I saw a flash of black and white and to my surprise, a ring ouzel was flitting about above it! I was able to watch it descend into Hull Pot and sit on a branch. It proceeded to fly in and out until a bunch of excited young men came over to admire this geological spectacle and it flew away (I’ve since been back and spent forty five minutes hiding in sedge being bothered by gnats whilst I could hear one calling nearby but never actually saw it).

With a happy heart and buoyed along by the singing of skylarks, I continued to the summit of Plover Hill where, sure enough, I caught sight of a large flock of birds flying and then settling on a drystone wall in the mist. I crept along, keeping low to avoid scaring them, and as I was doing so I discovered that the heather was littered with beautiful golden barred feathers. I didn’t have to get too close to see that there was a flock of around sixty of these stunning waders and every now and then I could hear the little plaintive cry which I always associate with the upper fells.

Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley described them in their book, Yorkshire Cottage (1942): they haunt particular stretches of the moor, where they will stand motionless on rock or tufts of heather for long periods. Aloof and handsome in their golden plumage, they might be called the aristocrats of the moor. Just as their plumage loses itself in the heather and bents, so their melancholy whistling note might be the wind of the crags.

I’m now off to the studio to do some thinking and drawing. Tomorrow I plan to cycle up beyond Ribblehead to the place that I saw lapwings displaying to each on my drive home from the museum. Happy days!

NB I would love to hear anyone’s memories of birds in the Yorkshire Dales and particularly any thoughts about declining population numbers, you can leave me a note here or contact me through my website, thank you: https://www.hestercox.com.

Cherish – Celebrating Priority Bird Species in the Yorkshire Dales

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As we begin 2026 and are dealing with the fluctuating winter weather across the country, my thoughts are turning to the project that I will be working on well into 2027. Cherish is the title and it will culminate in a joint exhibition with Sally Zaranko at the Dales Countryside Museum (DCM) in the summer of 2027. Using our own experience of the landscape, archival material from the museum and the Nature Recovery Plan for the Yorkshire Dales National Park (YDNPA), the project will celebrate the priority bird species that exist across the YDNP thanks to its varied and distinctive landscape.

Bird’s Eye View, collagraph print inspired by the cattle grazed area of Ingleborough Nature Reserve where bird’s eye primroses thrive in spring and wheatears, meadow pipits and skylarks nest.

The idea has been in the back of my mind since working on the DCM’s Ink Inspiration project celebrating the life and work of Marie Hartley, their founder. During my research, I came across an entry in one of her diaries in the museum archives (see below). It was from 1947 and listed all the birds that she had seen in the Askrigg area. What particularly drew me to the list was the corncrake. These birds are now only very rarely seen whilst on passage through the dales due to changes in land-use & farming practises making it unfavourable for their successful breeding. In fact, many of the birds that Marie saw regularly are now red or amber listed species and I made a print called Marie’s List in response to that idea (read more about that HERE)

Marie Hartley’s bird list as found ink one of her diaries in the DCM archive.

“The Nature Recovery Plan (NRP) for the Yorkshire Dales National Park sets out the Biodiversity Forum‘s aspirations for action between now and 2040, aiming to conserve and enhance the biodiversity within the National Park“

I have chosen a selection of birds from the Category A & B lists in the plan, birds that appear on Marie’s List and ones that I encounter myself within the Three Peaks Area of the Yorkshire Dales. I hope that through my research and subsequent print work, I will join Sally in celebrating the fact that the YDNP has significant populations of these species within the UK and to make links between the varied habitats that support them. Between us we will also be drawing on the personal experiences of birds by people living and working in the dales through the oral history project.

Sumer is Icumen In, collagraph print from Charms and Murmurings. The cuckoo is one of my selected birds for Cherish

Following on from Charms and Murmurings, I will be exploring some of the cultural history of birds through folklore, place names, vernacular bird names and historical records. It is exciting to have this time to become fully immersed in a subject that I have had a lifelong interest in thanks to my parents particularly my mother who, following her degree and phd in zoology as a mature student, became an ecological consultant. It is so nice to be able to draw on her vast knowledge (and library!) and to have the kind of conversations that spark new ideas for prints.

Should anybody reading this blog have their own memories of birds in the Yorkshire Dales that they would like to share, please do feel free to comment below or send me a message through my website HERE. I’d love to hear them.