The UK’s rarest bird of prey has successfully bred in a secret location for a second consecutive year, with conservationists crediting one polyamorous male with bringing the species back from near extinction in the country.
Montagu’s harriers – raptors referred to as the “aristocrats of the bird world” – were put on a red list of birds most at risk in the UK in 2021, with no breeding pairs spotted between 2020 and 2023.
But one adult male known as AU is now keeping Britain’s “Monties” population alive.
He’s responsible for at least 16 chicks since 2018, according to the wildlife conservation charity The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), including six juveniles that were bred this year with two females in two different nests. AU had previously bred four chicks with a female in 2025, after a six-year wait in the UK for new Montagu’s harrier families.
“When we ringed him as a chick in 2016 in a different part of the country we had no idea that ten years later he would single-handedly prop up the species in Britain,” said the RSPB’s Mark Thomas.
The charity’s fieldworkers in July fitted one chick from each of the two nests with satellite tracking tags to follow their migration and survival – marking the first time in the UK that juvenile Montagu’s harriers have been tagged.
“Monties” travel to Europe from Africa each spring to breed, but only a small number head to the UK, according to the RSPB.
AU arrived and began performing his aerial courtship displays in early May, an RSPB spokesperson told CNN.
These “acrobatic” displays, known as “skydancing,” feature “high-altitude dives, rhythmic ‘U’-shaped undulations, loops, and twists accompanied by rapid, cackling vocalizations,” the spokesperson said, adding that AU “pulled off the two nests through hard work and a good food supply.”
The raptors’ breeding population peaked at around 30 breeding pairs in the mid-1950s, decreasing to zero in 1974, before rising to up to 13 pairs in the late 2000s, according to BTO.
A sustained collaboration with farmers and birdwatchers led to breeding success this year and in 2025, said the RSPB, which attributes those gains to keeping the birds’ breeding location under wraps.
“This is a sensitive species that is easily disturbed,” the RSPB said, adding that they decided to keep the location of the new nests “a secret” as the birds might also return to the same breeding sites again. Plus, the nests are on private land, they said.
One of the two nests spotted this year was found inside a patch of barley left as a habitat by a farmer, with the other nest located less than a mile away, according to the charity.
