pipit

We don't see the owls he has encountered along here before, and our excitement at thinking we have spotted a meadow pipit perched on a post is rapidly doused when we realise it is just a splinter out of the wood.

Nightingale, greenfinch, grey partridge, marsh tit, skylark, nightjar and tree pipit - all Red List species - have been recorded.

They include: the Sprague’s pipit, a northern grassland songbird, that’s lost more than 75% of its population since 1970.

“Where along that full life cycle both in time and space are these birds suffering the most?” says Andy Boyce, a research ecologist at the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center who studies the Sprague’s pipit.

Among birds at a tipping point: Sprague’s pipit, a songbird that’s lost more than 75% of its population since 1970 and breeds only in portions of Montana, North Dakota and small patches of three Canadian provinces.