Turning heads

This small, brown, ant-eating woodpecker dwindled to extinction as a British breeding bird last century. But wrynecks still turn up during spring and autumn migration, especially on the east coast. The BTO’s BirdTrack website shows a dramatic spike in records in September, when favoured sites such as Yorkshire’s Spurn Point attract the cryptically plumaged migrants en route from Scandinavia to Africa. It has an owl-like ability to swivel its head to look behind it.

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Spurn’s Migfest 2018 is 7–9 Septem September: spurnmigfest.com