Watch Out For Hoopoes!
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Guest Post by Ian Magness
Now, as anyone who has ever seen one (and they are pretty common around the Mediterranean) can attest, the hoopoe is a most striking bird, unique in colour and shape. Furthermore, they feed on open ground and are happy in parks, gardens and golf courses, so they are easy to find. This is not, therefore, one of those birds that is likely to sneak into and roam around Britain unseen, especially in modern times when so many more people watch birds. Records can thus be viewed as pretty reliable. So, what do the facts tell us?
Points are as follows:
– Hoopoes have been seen visiting Britain for hundreds of years. They are scarce vagrants, generally appearing pre- (spring, especially) or post- nesting periods (autumn) as the birds either seek breeding opportunities or disperse away from their nesting areas. Southern and eastern Britain sightings predominate but they have been spotted all over the British Isles. Very occasional birds have attempted to nest and some have done so successfully. Never in recorded history, however, has there ever been a viable British breeding population. As Coward put it in 1925: “To our knowledge, it has been striving to establish itself for two and a half centuries”.
– Birds of Wiltshire goes into some detail about the growth and decline of hoopoe sightings and nesting. Essentially, it reports that hoopoes had a pretty comprehensive European breeding range – south to north – historically. The range contracted more toward its southern heartland, however, between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries and appears to have been pretty stable since. The reasons are not known but habitat (and thus food) loss is implicated. This is the opposite of what you would expect from global warming.
– In line with the decline noted above, the number of successful British hoopoe nests (never more than a great rarity) all but disappeared by the mid-1970s. To my knowledge (I could of course be wrong), there have been no successful British nests in the 21st century.
– Britishbirds.co.uk reports total annual sightings since the late 1960s to 2021 as being between around 100 and 150 (albeit that some of these would likely be the same birds moving around). Importantly, when looking at “Trend” in the sightings, the site states “None”.
Conclusions
The Daily Mail article contains the following statement:
“Due to global warming, scientists believe the hoopoe may set up home on British shores, with scores of sightings being reported every year.”
1) Yes, there are scores of sightings in Britain each year but twas always thus and there is no trend whatsoever. No doubt there were more birds around in Victorian and Georgian times when the hoopoe range allowed more northerly birds to come across the seas to visit Britain more easily. That would have facilitated some breeding but there has been little or none over the last 50 years or so.
2) As for “Due to global warming, scientists believe the hoopoe may set up home on British shores” – frankly, it is hard to be polite because this is demonstrable rubbish. What “scientists”? What data? Where? Are we expecting a Mediterranean climate any time soon?
This just looks like yet another example of a journalist being fed some puerile climate story that would have taken five minutes of research to rebuff. Whatever drives UK and European populations of the magnificent hoopoe, there is no evidence that anthropogenic climate change (even if such exists) has played the slightest part.
References
Coward’s “The Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs” 1925
Wiltshire Ornithological Society’s “Birds of Wiltshire” 2007
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Maybe send this delicious demolition article to the daft journalist?
They’ve done a wHoopsie with their wHopper.
Are the parakeets in London (spreading out initially from Richmond Park) a ‘sign’ too? More a sign of all the hard working gardeners growing fruit and berries in their gardens. Like the ‘rotting meat’ scare too, very impressive, although there is some truth in that at least.
Bishops Park in London is full of them and they survive even pretty cold winters. I’d read they originally escaped from Isleworth when The African Queen was filmed there!
That’s one theory certainly. My father, a keen bird watcher and gardener was somewhat torn by their depredations in my parents’ garden in Surbiton.
Shepperton, I think, not Isleworth. As an Isleworth resident, I can say that we got them rather later than some places further west.
No It was a ship that had sailed round the world for 7 years with a caargo of Paarakeets crashed into Walton Bridge, and to float it they bashed on the side to make the parakeets fly around to lighten the weight , but they all escaped. When they first appeared in 1984 in Sunbury they used to make a yattering noise outside the window . That roused the missus who yattered back . I was in two mind whether to shoot the parakeets or the missus.
And why are they there and not ranging across the countryside….BECAUSE of Urban Heat Island Effect which the Official Temperature Data Fiddlers extrapolate out into the countryside on both sides of the pond, raising countryside temperatures. The claim is they “adjust” for UHI effects. If serious science is being done, the first action is to identify and exclude anomalous data. To insist on including anomalous data shouts FOUL PLAY.
What justification can there be for including this data except to have a desperately sought for source of heat to hand to “fiddle” into their temperature fudging results by sleight of hand and then use to claim pointless asinine records as part of their carfully orchestrated Klymutt Sheyngshe Fear porn campaign..
Recent A level and O level results and the UK temperature record have a lot in common!
We get these parakeets in Johannesburg, South Africa. And – we DO have fairly cold winters, that the parakeets seem to survive quite well. When the flock take over a tree in your garden, the racket can make you think anti-RSPB thoughts!
The last three years we’ve had nesting pair in our farmhouse in the Dordogne. Very nice bird, nests in the gaps in our stone walls.
They make a tasty meal for Peregrine Falcons, even in London.
I meant Parakeets, not Hoopoes. But then who knows?
My 2006 RSPB handbook of British Birds says hoopoes have nested in the UK 20 times in the last 200 years and up too100 are seen most years but numbers vary. They have also been found as far north as the Shetlands although they are mostly seen in Cornwall, Devon and along the Southern Coast
My 1960 edition says that can be seen in Southern and Eastern England in the spring.
I live in western France where they are common. It was the only bird that my cat would not chase (It was too slow to catch the other birds). I think that the formidable bill looked too dangerous. It would watch them and ‘growl’.
Yes, the bill does look rather formidable. That is why when I had to release one that had caught in some hanging fishing nets I first found my gloves. I was very embarrassed afterwards, it really is very delicate!
And NO smell!!!!
The article is absolute rubbish – how can you say it will visit more often because of climate change when we have them in our village in Latvia?
One obvious necessity for their being in our particular area is because the ground is very sandy, means they can easily penetrate the surface with their beaks, and we have an abundance of ground insects because the area has never been sprayed. We welcome them not only because of their beauty, but also because they love the mole crickets, which are a real plague to our garden and otherwise almost impossible to eradicate.
We have them in our garden in Tarn, SW France and have never noticed a smell. What a silly article!
Perhaps the journalist was emitting the odour —as in: “he who smelt it dealt it”.
https://garden-birds.co.uk/birds/hoopoe.html
Never noticed a smell in India. But have noticed a spread of cowbirds or a Little Egrets coming up to south Brittany and further north. We have one and sometimes a couple here in Hampshire now. We’re all gonna fry!!
We had some egrets in my corner of Surrey a year ago but not seen any around this winter even with all the flooded fields we have had.
We’re in Herefordshire. Egrets? We’ve had a few, but then again, enough to mention.
Do they smell like dirty diapers?
Is this bird a good indicator of the AMO cycle?
They certainly reach Yorkshire on occasion, only ever seen them a couple of times though.
Gilbert White the Hampshire naturalist wrote in 1767, ‘ The most unusual birds I ever observed in these parts were a pair of hoopoes (upupa) which came several years ago in the summer, and frequented an ornamented piece of ground, which joins to my garden, for some weeks. They used to march about in a stately manner, feeding in the walks, many times in the day; and seemed disposed to breed in my outlet; but were frightened and persecuted by idle boys, who would never let them be at rest.’
Ask not where the Hoo pees.
I saw one on a campsite in southern France a decade or so ago.
Close to my village where I lived in Suffolk there appeared an entire field covered in thousands of the little blighters, roundabout 2004 to my recollection.
Perhaps as many as 20 Hoopoes have bred in Britain in the last 200 years.
https://garden-birds.co.uk/birds/hoopoe.html
I used to call these stories “Global warming Could” … they were just third rate fillers of no journalistic merit stuffed in when there was no real news to report … or as now … no one paying the lame stream media to lie about something.
When I decided to investigate one of these, I found that climate wasn’t even mentioned in the original research … it had been added in a press release by someone trying to “liven up” the paper to get the lying journalists interested.