Shandon Woodland Community Group
Meet the Birds
Shandon Woodland isn't just home to trees, it's also a haven for hundreds of birds, both year-round residents and seasonal migrants.
Over twelve months, from June 2025 to June 2026, we conducted a community-led bird survey of Shandon Woodland. The results tell us something remarkable about the woodland.
Seventy-three species call it home, fly through it, or return to it year after year, including species that need centuries-old trees, decaying wood, and undisturbed structure to find a place to live. More than a third of everything recorded is on the UK's Red or Amber conservation lists, which means that Shandon Woodland contains birds that are quickly disappearing from the rest of Britain.
Among the most striking finds is the Spotted Flycatcher, a small red-listed migrant that winters in Central or Southern Africa and returns each spring to breed in Shandon Woodland - a round trip of up to 14,000 kilometres. It's one of twelve species that make a similar journey from sub-Saharan Africa every year, choosing this particular stretch of woodland out of an entire continent's worth of options.
The survey also confirmed a community of bark-foraging specialists including the Nuthatch, Treecreeper, and Great Spotted Woodpecker, whose presence depends on the kind of veteran, decaying trees that take centuries to develop and cannot be replaced once lost. Together with the woodland's rainforest-indicator species, they point to a functioning, intact fragment of Atlantic temperate rainforest, one of the rarest habitat types on Earth.
Read the full report
The complete findings, including the full species record, seasonal breakdown, and the story of how this survey came about, are written up in All the Birds, available to download in full below. The underlying dataset is also free for anyone to use.
Report & Data: Shandon Woodland Community Group / Rhu and Shandon Community Trust (SC054091), 'All the Birds: A Community-Led Bird Survey of Shandon Woodland, 2025–2026' © 2026 by Kelsey Hoppe is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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