Tweet of the Day

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the meadow pipit. No-one would give the meadow pipit any prizes in a beauty competition but this small streaky bird has its own charm, as it bustles through the turf with a jerky motion. If you're hiking across the moor it will rise ahead of you, dither in mid-air and...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the swallow. A flash of blue across farmland or a stableyard and a burst of twittering can only mean one thing, the swallows are back after their long migration from South Africa. No matter how grey the April weather, the sight and sound of a swallow dispels the winte...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the common whitethroat. Whitethroats are warblers which winter in the Sahel region south of the Sahara desert and spend spring and summer in Europe. When they arrive in April the males establish a territory by singing that scratchy song from hedgerow perches or by lau...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the great grey shrike. Great grey shrikes feed on small birds, which they can catch in flight. They also eat mice, voles and shrews and, as spring approaches, they'll include bees and larger beetles in their diet. Shrikes are also known as "butcher birds" because of t...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the grasshopper warbler. The reeling song of the grasshopper warbler sounds more like an insect than a bird. Like the paying out of an angler's line from a reel, the grasshopper warbler's song spills out from the bush or bramble clump in which he sits. You'll hear it...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the bittern. As the first shoots of spring appear in the reed-beds, you might hear the booming sound of a bittern. The bittern's boom is lower pitched than any other UK bird and sounds more like a distant foghorn than a bird. Today these birds are on the increase, tha...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the curlew. The haunting song of the curlew instantly summons the spirit of wild places. By April, most curlews have left their winter refuge on estuaries and marshes and have returned to their territories on moorland or upland pastures. Wherever they breed you'll hea...

Kate Humble presents the snipe. The snipe is an intricately patterned wader, not much bigger than a blackbird but with an enormously long bill. In the breeding season they fly high above their territories before dashing earthwards and then sweeping upwards again. Throughout this display you'll hear a bleating sound, known as 'drumming'. Find out how the sound is made in today's programme. Producer...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the willow warbler. The first willow warblers return from Africa in late March. Willow warblers were once the commonest and most widespread summer migrant to the UK but in the last two decades numbers in the south and east of England have dropped. Fortunately in Scotl...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the story of the black grouse. A black grouse lek is one of Nature's spectacles. Charged with testosterone, the males, known as 'black cocks', compete on 'jousting lawns' for the females or grey hens. Fanning their lyre-shaped tails and displaying a flurry of white un...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Kate Humble presents the woodcock. Woodcocks are waders, thickset, long-billed, and superbly camouflaged. On the woodland floor, where they hide by day, their rust, fawn and black plumage conceals them among the dead leaves of winter. Often the first sign that they're about is a blur of r...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the ring ouzel. Ring ouzels are related to blackbirds and because they nest in the uplands, they’re sometimes known as the ‘mountain blackbird’. The male ring ouzel is a handsome bird, sooty black with a broad white ring called a ‘gorget’ right across his chest that st...

As part of Radio 4's Character Invasion, Chris Packham presents a unique Tweet of the Day to tell the story of Big Bird. Avis giganteus, is , as its scientific name suggests, a large, conspicuous and highly vocal species, and one of the few birds for which binoculars are redundant. At a staggering 249 cm high, it is over-topped only by the male ostrich. But while the ostrich is an athletic creatur...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the black redstart. It was the German Luftwaffe which enabled black redstarts to gain a real foothold here. The air-raids of the Blitz created bombsites which mimicked their rocky homes and the weeds that grew there attracted insects. In 1942 there over twenty singing...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the little ringed plover. In 1938, there was great excitement at a Hertfordshire reservoir. On the gravelly shoreline a pair of birds, which had never bred in the UK before, were showing signs of nesting. They were little ringed plovers, summer visitors to Continental...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the ruff. The glory of the ruff lies in its extravagant courtship displays. For most of the year these waders look similar to our other long-legged water-birds such as redshanks or sandpipers but in the breeding season the males sprout a multi-coloured ruff. The impres...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the alpine swift. Alpine swifts are impressive anchor-shaped birds, the colour of coffee above and milk-white below. In the UK Alpine swifts are annual visitors, appearing in Spring, but they don't breed here. They spend the winter in Africa and on their journey north...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the Egyptian goose. Although Egyptian geese are common throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa and in Egypt, they are now officially a British bird. These striking birds attracted the attention of wildfowl collectors and the first geese were brought to the UK in the 17th...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the snow goose. Snow geese breed in the Canadian Arctic and fly south in autumn to feed. Their migrations are eagerly awaited and the arrival of thousands of these white geese with black-wingtips is one of the world’s great wildlife spectacles. Here, on the opposite si...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the goldeneye. Although they’re a common winter visitor, you’ll need to travel to Speyside in the Scottish Highlands to see goldeneyes in their breeding season where, since 1970, a small population has bred there. Unlike dabbling ducks, such as mallard and teal, they d...

Bill Oddie presents the sand martin. The flickering shapes of sand martins over a lake or reservoir are a welcome sign of spring. After winging their way across the Sahara Desert, the first birds usually arrive in the UK in March. They're smaller than house martins or swallows, and they're brown above and white below with a brown band across their chest. Often you can hear their dry buzzing calls...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the great crested grebe. In Spring, great crested grebes perform a high ritualized mating display. This includes head shaking and a spectacular performance during which both male and female birds gather bunches of waterweed and as they swim towards each other, before r...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the Grey partridge. The grey partridge, a plump game bird, is now a rarity across most of the UK. Found on farmland, a partridge pair will often hold territory in a few fields beyond which they seldom stray during their whole lives. They should be doing well but increa...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the woodlark. Woodlarks are closely related to skylarks, but they're much rarer in the UK, where they’re mainly confined, as breeding birds, to southern England. Unlike the skylark, the male woodlark will sing from trees but his piece de resistance is the song-flight i...

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Bill Oddie presents the Cetti's warbler. Until the 1960s, Cetti's warblers were unknown in the UK but on the Continent they were common in marshy areas, especially dense scrub and the edge of reed-beds and ditches. They first bred in these habitats in south-east England in the early 1970s...