‘The Tree Pipit is a common summer visitor to this county, arriving regularly in the early half of April, and nesting freely in all the rural districts, as well as in many localities…’
So wrote John Bucknill, author of the sublime groundbreaking work Birds of Surrey (R H Porter) back in 1900.
He could have never foreseen what was coming. Or rather not coming.
More than a century later the bird is increasingly ‘not for seeing’ in our local heathland habitat, many other areas of our country and in Europe too.
This shy ‘parachuting pipit’ is a summer visitor and breeder on heathland. It arrives usually in the first week of April and generally stays into the third week of August. Some years it may be found in early September.
It can so easily be dismissed as ‘another LBJ’ (Little Brown Job). Look again. If you can see it up close or through ‘bins’ you are greeted with a jigsaw of subtle thick and thin streaks – like dead grass stalks – along the length of its body except on its white belly.
The camouflage protects it from predators and helps it merge into the undergrowth where it nests and walks about on its pink legs searching for food.
But it is up in the air doing its display flight where this fella is most impressive. It does a dance in the sky.
From the top of an isolated tree the male sings a fast series of loud trills at various pitches. The song continues as it rises vertically before descending, seemingly in slow motion, back to its vantage point using its spread tail and wings as air brakes.
Numbers of this ‘common‘ bird on our commons and heaths were already falling back in the 1970s in Surrey with many sites around the North Downs losing them. But these birds still proved fairly easy to see. Like a lot of others I probably took them too much for granted
I counted as many as 10 displaying at one site back in April 1985, eight males were there in 1997 and a century on from when John Bucknill wrote his book there were a dozen.
They could also be found at various sites including Willinghurst, Winterfold, Pitch Hill and Holmbury Hill.
I have noticed that the Tree Pipit’s arrival time cleverly coincides with the departure of their smaller wintering cousins, Meadow Pipits, on their own journey north.
But as with other once familiar summer migrants – such as Spotted Flycatcher, Wood Warbler and Redstart – who visit us from south of The Sahara in the humid zone of western Africa, there has been an alarming drop in numbers in the 2000s.
The species is now on the UK Birds of Conservation Concern’s ‘red list’, having dropped from green to the amber list in 2002 and into the danger zone in 2009.
This year of 2025 is the fifth year running when I feared I would not find one. I ended up walking many miles in search of a Tree Pipit in the Spring and each time, eventually, I was rewarded.
On each occasion it might have been only one singing male but it was certainly enough to trigger my internal golden buzzer. All of these birds were at different sites in the Cranleigh area and I have no idea if they ever found a mate or successfully bred.
Various threats have been identified for the loss of birds like the Tree Pipit, such as forest and woodland management changes, intensification of agriculture on farms leading to loss of breeding and feeding habitat, and increased predation and climate changes.
On their migration routes there has been a loss of feeding areas, especially with the drying up of wetlands, and – again – predation and climate change.
But there is also continued hunting in many south European countries. There are relatively few recoveries of ringed Tree Pipits but of those ringed in England, Scotland and Wales, and subsequently found dead, 35% were deliberately taken by Man.
Tree Pipits first make landfall in Portugal on their Autumn journeys south and British Trust for Ornithology data has reported that a cluster of recoveries from that country ‘is mainly of birds that have been shot, and so may simply reflect the intensity of hunting pressure encountered.’ Why would anyone want to shoot a Tree Pipit or other small bird? Dunno.
There are threats too on the wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, including drought, arable and livestock expansion and intensification, trees being chopped down for fuel and construction work.
Parachuting is the least of their problems.
