ONE of Europe's rarest birds has bred successfully in North Yorkshire for the first time in decades.

Corncrake chicks were spotted in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in August after a farmer in the Pennine Dales environmentally sensitive area heard the bird's distinctive cry earlier in the summer.

Staff from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs worked with national park officers to develop a management plan to enable the farmer to continue working the land but also protect the birds.

Corncrakes are shy birds and favour traditionally-farmed grassland and mechanised mowing devastated their numbers. The plan was based on a mowing pattern, cutting from the centre outwards, to allow any chicks to escape to the field edge.

The location of the site was also kept secret.

Corncrake populations declined dramatically over the last 100 years and the bird is listed as a globally threatened species - one of only two species with this status to breed in the UK.

Though action in the Nineties halted the decline, the UK's small population of about 900 male birds and an unknown number of females was confined to north and north-west Scotland.

Martin O'Hanlon, senior Defra adviser for the Pennine dales ESA, said: "Once we knew the bird was there we took every precaution we could to ensure that if any eggs were laid the chicks would have the best possible chance of survival."

Defra minister Elliot Morley told the Wildlife Trust's national conservation conference in Leeds on Tuesday: "I am impressed and heartened at the speed and effectiveness with which everyone involved in this extraordinary project acted.

"The result is a significant conservation achievement and very exciting news for the English countryside."

See Birdwatch, page 24