Tweet of the Day

Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world. Sir David Attenborough presents the Florida scrub jay. Less than 6,000 Florida scrub jays exist in the wild, yet these are some of the most intelligent creatures in the world. Long term research has revealed an extraordinary intelligence. If other jays are around, a bird will only hide its food when the o...

Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world. Sir David Attenborough presents the North American red-winged blackbird. The arrival of spring in the USA is heralded by the unmistakable "conk-ra-lee" call of the red-winged blackbird. The male blackbirds, who are un-related to the European blackbird, flutter their red and yellow wing-patches like regime...

Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world. Sir David Attenborough presents a seabird with a worldwide distribution, the brown noddy. Expert fliers, the brown noddy is seldom seen near land and is highly pelagic, wandering extensively in warm tropical waters where it searches for small fish and squid which are captured by hover-dipping and contact-...

Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world. Sir David Attenborough presents the Central Asian bar-headed goose. The bar-headed goose is a high-flier of the bird world. Bar-headed geese are migrants which undertake one of the most arduous journeys of any bird. They breed mainly in the remote lakes of the Tibetan Plateau, but overwinter on the plains...

Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world. Sir David Attenborough presents the Australian magpie. These large pibald birds with pickaxe bills reminded early settlers of the more familiar European magpie, but in fact they are not crows at all. Australian magpies have melodious voices which can range over four octaves in a chorus of squeaks, yodels...

Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world. Sir David Attenborough presents the South American hoatzin. Moving clumsily through riverside trees the funky Mohican head crested hoatzin looks like it has been assembled by a committee. Hoatzin's eat large quantities of leaves and fruit, and to cope with this diet have a highly specialised digestive sys...

Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world. Sir David Attenborough presents the blue bird of paradise. The crow sized blue birds of paradise provide a spectacular flash of blue in the Papua New Guinea rainforests yet it is the males dazzling courtship performance which grabs a female's attention. Tipping forward from his perch he hangs upside down...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about British birds inspired by their calls and songs. David Attenborough presents the story of the pied flycatcher. The pied flycatcher is the voice of western woods, as much a part of the scenery as lichen-covered branches, mossy boulders and tumbling streams. When they arrive here in spring from Africa the black and white males, which are slig...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about British birds inspired by their calls and songs. David Attenborough presents the story of the whimbrel. Whimbrels are sometimes known as 'seven whistlers' from the number of notes in their call and in parts of the English midlands these sounds in the darkness gave rise to a folk tale about the six birds of fate which flew around the heavens...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about British birds inspired by their calls and songs. David Attenborough presents the story of the reed bunting. The reed bunting makes up for its lack of musicality with striking good looks. Male birds have jet black heads and a white moustache and look stunning on a spring day as they sit on shrubs or sway on reed stems, flicking their tales n...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about British birds inspired by their calls and songs. David Attenborough introduces the final recording marking International Dawn Chorus day. The urban dawn chorus was recorded by Chris Watson in Whitechapel, London as part of a project to enable the children of the Royal London Children's Hospital to hear the wildlife sounds on their doorstep....

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about British birds inspired by their calls and songs. David Attenborough presents the third of four recordings marking Dawn Chorus Day: a dawn chorus from the marshes of North Warren in Suffolk. On clear moonlit nights the chorus can be an almost continuous chatter and includes reed and sedge warblers, reed bunting and even a bittern, with its b...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about British birds inspired by their calls and songs. David Attenborough presents the second of four recordings marking the dawn chorus, this time the heather moors of Allendale in Northumberland. Songs featured are that of the curlew, skylark, golden plover and redshank.

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about British birds inspired by their calls and songs. David Attenborough presents a dawn chorus recorded in Rutland Water. The outpouring of song is so dense that it is almost impossible to single out individual species but includes blackbirds, song thrushes, robins and newly-arrived migrants like garden warblers.

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the stone curlew. Stone curlews belong to a family known as 'thick-knees' but their country name of 'goggle-eyed plover' suits them better. Their huge staring yellow eyes serve them well at night when they're most active. By day, they lie up on sparse grassland or hea...

Kate Humble presents the fulmar, a familiar cliff nesting seabird during the breeding season. For the rest of the year fulmar can be found over the cold subarctic northern oceans of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Coming to land only to breed, these tubenose birds despite resembling other seabirds, are closely related to petrels and albatrosses.

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the red-throated diver. The eerie wails of a red-throated diver were supposed to foretell rain. In Shetland the red-throated diver is called the "rain goose" but anyone who knows the island knows that rain is never far away. Like all divers, red-throats are handsome b...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the goosander. Goosanders are handsome ducks and belong to a group known as 'sawbills' because their long slender bills are lined with backward pointing 'teeth', for gripping slippery fish. Underwater they're as agile as otters, chasing fish in raging currents or nosi...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the ruddy duck. Ruddy ducks are natives of North America. In the late 1950s and early 1960s several ruddy ducks escaped from the Wildfowl Trust's collection at Slimbridge and within 30 years they had become established breeding birds in the UK. Some even migrated to S...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the capercaillie. The bizarre knife-grinding, cork-popping display of the male capercaillie is one of the strangest sounds produced by any bird. The name 'Capercaillie' is derived from the Gaelic for 'horse of the woods', owing to the cantering sound, which is the sta...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the stock dove. Perhaps 'stock pigeon' would be a better name, because they're like slightly smaller versions of the woodpigeon. Unlike their bigger relatives they have no white marks on their wings or neck and are more blue-grey in colour. When they fly, they look du...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the little grebe. Little grebes are our smallest grebes. They're dumpy birds with dark brown feathers and in the breeding season have a very obvious chestnut patch on their necks and cheeks. Little grebes are secretive birds, especially in the breeding season when the...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the little owl. Little owls really are little, about as long as a starling but much stockier with a short tail and rounded wings. If you disturb one it will bound off low over the ground before swinging up onto a telegraph pole or gatepost where it bobs up and down, g...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the hoopoe. The hoopoe, a salmon-coloured bird with a long curved bill and a black-tipped crest, which it can spread like a fan when excited, is so outrageously exotic that its call reminds us of the Mediterranean. Several hoopoes arrive in the UK each spring and autu...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the green woodpecker. The maniacal laughing call, or 'yaffle', of a green woodpecker was supposed to herald rain, hence its old country name of 'rain bird'. You can hear their yodelling calls in woods, parks, heaths and large gardens throughout most of the UK. Altough...