Buzzards spread wings – but where have the kestrels gone?

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Two of Britain's best known birds of prey are undergoing starkly contrasting changes in abundance – one very much up, and the other plummeting.

The differing fortunes of the common buzzard, which is soaring in population, and the kestrel, Britain's commonest falcon but now in sharp decline, are highlighted by the first fieldwork for the mammoth new atlas of the breeding birds of Britain and Ireland.

Under the supervision of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), thousands of volunteer observers are plotting the distribution of all of the British Isles' 200-plus breeding species over the next four years, in a vast exercise to update the last atlas, which was published in 1991.

Comparison with the 1991 atlas clearly shows the notable changes in population affecting various species, and this weekend the BTO releases provisional data from this spring's surveys on four of them: the kestrel, the lapwing and the yellow wagtail – all declining in comparison with their 1991 range – and the buzzard, strongly increasing.