Booming Bitterns

Available for over a year

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives. Sounding rather like air being blown over the top of an empty milk bottle, the male bitterns call once heard drifting over the landscape is not easily forgotten. The bittern is a shy secretive member of the heron family who is more often heard than seen. Once widespread over the British Isles, following human persecution and loss of its reedbed habitat it became extinct in Britain around 1885. A few decades later a small number of continental bitterns had returned to our shores but the fate of the bittern population was still precarious. In this programme from 2004 the best place in the UK to hear a bittern was in the extensive wetlands and reedbeds of East Anglia. Brett Westwood travelled to Minsmere in Suffolk in the company of Ian Hawkins and Ken Smith of the RSPB in search of a bittern booming. Producer Andrew Dawes.