Norfolk Nature: Spring 2026 Part 3

 Spring 2026: Spring Brecks.

Every year, birders from the north coast of Norfolk make a number of pilgrimages to the Brecks, the dry lands of heath and pine in the south of the county on the borders with Suffolk, in the hope of seeing some of the rare and beautiful birds which still inhabit this distinctive landscape.

Few birds capture the mysterious quality of this flat and flinty area as well as the stone curlew, a bird which is a wader by definition but more of a game bird by habit, remaining largely immobile by day, camouflaged inscrutably against the sandy Breckland earth, but active at night, its mournful call drifting out at dusk. The NWT reserve at Weeting Heath has long been a place to see this shy creature and there is something appropriate about the human eye having to work to the natural world, slowly deconstructing the landscape of stone and scrape to identify the piercing yellow eye and bright beak and then to conjure the body around it.

Mistle thrushes, though similarly coloured, are much more obvious, bobbing across the uneven ground and stopping to strike a pose every few metres, as if the stony soil was a film premiere's red carpet.

In this place of straight lines of road and field and pine, the Little Ouse runs a ragged and fertile course, defining the border between Norfolk and Suffolk in slow meanders between banks of poplar and willow. The sun had invaded the previous clear night's sky unchallenged and from patches of open ground, the wood lark's sweet song spilled fluidly onto the crisp air.

Redpolls and bramblings squeaked and wheezed in the sallows and siskins chattered in small flocks in the treetops

while below them, the drifting course of the river bent in luminous arcs. For a moment, its surface was broken by the folds of a bow wave and then a head appeared. The otter lifted from the water and dived  noiselessly under again before emerging a few yards upstream, only to be lost completely around the tangle of a jutting bush.

A marsh tit inspected the mossy crevices of a nearby willow and a treecreeper beetled along a branch with the woods resounding to the calls of green and great spotted woodpeckers, and then, after what seemed a good distance, the higher-pitched peeping of the lesser spotted woodpecker cut through the mass of trunks and branches. The bird, a female, was actually much closer than its thin call suggested and for over an hour its rapid drumming from a decaying stump and excavation, not just for food but of a nest-hole, was absorbing.

Though the male was heard, it was not seen at the nest-site and the hole remained unused. The decline in this busy, characterful species has been marked in recent decades and, just as with sightings of the turtle dove, one wonders how long this once widespread bird will survive in the county.