Abstract

A second-calendar-year Bearded Vulture Gypaetus barbatus spent nearly four months in England in 2020, and settled in the Peak District for several weeks in the summer. DNA analysis of feathers collected from a preening site on 30th August revealed that the bird fledged from a French territory in the Bargy Massif, in the Haute-Savoie region of the northwest Alps, on 6th July 2019. Its parents were a wild-hatched male that fledged from the same area, and a female reared in La Garenne Zoo in Switzerland and released as a fledgling in 2006 in Italy.A second-calendar-year Bearded Vulture Gypaetus barbatus was photographed near Balsall Common, West Midlands, during the afternoon of 26th June 2020 (Burrell 2020). Based upon matching plumage characteristics, the bird was identified as the same individual that had been observed in northern France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the Channel Islands during May and June 2020 (Burrell 2020). The vulture was then observed on several days in the southern Peak District before travelling farther north, where it used different roost sites in the vicinity of Derwent Edge throughout July. From 2nd August it settled in an area around Crowden and Woodhead Reservoir (Viles 2020), before departing the Peak District on 19th September. The vulture was subsequently seen in several counties of central, eastern and southern England, before arriving on the Sussex coast on 14th–15th October. It was last observed from the Beachy Head area, heading out across the Channel towards France on the last date (plate 12). This is the second record of a Bearded Vulture in Britain, the previous record being of another second-calendar-year individual, in southeast Wales and southwest England in May 2016 (McInerny & Stoddart 2019).