Background

In 1988 to 1993, at the time of the fieldwork for A summer atlas of the breeding birds of County Durham (Westerberg and Bowey, 2000), the Stonechat was regarded as “principally a scarce passage migrant in our area” and that, if the species bred in the county “…the population will not number more than one or two pairs…”. A paper by John Olley in Birds in Durham 2004 documents the increase in the species locally between 1997 and 2005, with confirmed breeding in 28 1-km squares, associating this pattern with milder winters. By the time of the publication of the county avifauna in 2012 the population was estimated at around 50 pairs. John Olley’s paper identifies five habitat types used by Stonechats in County Durham.

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