Do you remember the first time? Mine was 40 years ago this month, on a family holiday to Spain. As we trudged back from the beach, a bird the hue of sun-kissed sand flicked up from our feet. Morphing into a huge butterfly with startlingly zebra-striped wings, it fluttered uncertainly then bounced away. It was, unmistakeably, a hoopoe.
Fatigue and thirst forgotten, I gawped disbelievingly. An exotic-looking bird I knew solely from books was real.
Today, I marvel at hoopoes for a different, but similarly thrilling, reason. There are hints that this quintessentially Mediterranean resident may be poised to colonise the British countryside.
Resembling a fanciful AI creation, and roughly mistle thrush-sized (around 28cm in length), it is a bird of two halves. The wings and tail recall an MC Escher linocut of black and white stripes, yet its salmon-pink front and undersides are unmarked.
The long bill is downcurved like a curlew’s, the head counterweighted with an extravagant, black-dotted crest that can be fanned to resemble a Native American chief’s headdress.
Like the war bonnet, the hoopoe’s erectile crest sends a message – indeed, several. These birds flaunt their headgear to deter predators and to demonstrate superiority over rivals. Males also do it to impress – and inform – potential mates.
Scientists have discovered that the crest pattern is a reliable indicator of reproductive success and body condition. The more black spots a male has, the more likely he is to raise numerous chicks. By flashing his crest, the suitor offers the female vital intelligence about his suitability as a mate.
First, though, the male needs to let females know he is there. As in most bird species, males demarcate their territory through song. In his book Birds and People, Mark Cocker compares the hoopoe’s song to “the mellow sounds produced by blowing into the neck of a bottle”.
It’s still surprisingly effective, though. Sitting upright on an elevated perch, neck puffed out and bill pointing towards the ground, the male encourages his soft, repetitive refrain to carry more than a kilometre.
The sound is evidently familiar across many countries. A common transcription – ‘hoop hoop hoop’ – explains the species’ English name. Indeed, the bird’s moniker across several languages is onomatopoeic, hence poup (in Portugal), poppoo (Afghanistan), huh hud (in the Middle East) and the Latin genus name Upupa.
The French take it a step further: the name huppe has itself conceived the adjective huppé, meaning ‘crested’.
Through song, the male entices the female to inspect his territory. She has two prerequisites for breeding. Good feeding habitat is key. Open countryside with short vegetation and a soft substrate enables hoopoes to probe for subterranean insects with their scimitar-like bills.
The second must-have is suitable nest sites – pre-existing holes in trees, cliffs or rock piles are perfect, but so too are cavities in buildings or walls. Indeed, the willingness of the hoopoe to breed cheek by jowl with people helps to make it widely known.
This familiarity has led to varied cultural associations. As befits such an aesthetically pleasing species, many are positive. Ancient Egyptians considered hoopoes sacred, featuring the bird as a hieroglyph. Even into the 1980s, Egyptian parents would place the desiccated skin of a hoopoe over a child’s bedroom door to ward off bad luck.
In the Middle East more widely, the bird was believed to possess medicinal properties, while in China it symbolises joy.
In Islam, the hoopoe is revered, too. In the Qur’an, King Solomon and his wife-to-be call one into service as a winged messenger, and the Prophet Muhammad banned Muslims from killing the species. Rather more recently, and to my daughter’s delight, the CBeebies programme In the Night Garden features three CGI hoopoes among the ‘Tittifers’ – birds that usher in bedtime.
Hoopoe love is not universal, however. The Greek gods punished Tereus, King of Thrace, for imprisoning his wife and attacking her sister by turning him into a hoopoe. As Tereus searched for both women after their own transformation into birds, he was said to cry “ópou-ópou”, the hoopoe’s call, which is “Where? Where?” in Greek.
Meanwhile, in the Old Testament, Leviticus (11: 19) lists the hoopoe among the ‘unclean’ birds that must not be eaten. Here the hoopoe keeps ostensibly strange company, being bracketed with unkosher carrion scavengers such as vultures, storks and ravens. The likely justification for this pariah status is apparent only if our male and female hoopoe end up breeding as, unexpectedly, their nest stinks.
This smelly abode isn’t poor hygiene, however. Instead, the hoopoe’s honk provides an unusual weapon in its breeding armoury: chemical warfare. The female sprays the nest with a pungent green secretion from her preening gland.
This multipurpose spritz protects eggs from infection, fights off feather-degrading bacteria and tells predators that the birds taste unpleasant, so are best avoided. Should an intruder not get the message, nestlings deter attack with a squirt of liquid faeces.
A migrating population
Sadly, though, this colourful, charismatic bird is not native to Britain. Hoopoes like warm places, occurring widely across Africa and Asia. In Europe, resident populations in southern Iberia are complemented by birds migrating from African wintering grounds to breed as far north as north-west France and Latvia. Spain has the heftiest European population, but the hoopoe is also common throughout the Mediterranean, as far east as the Balkans.
But this colourful bird is not altogether unknown on our shores. Every spring, particularly if pushed by strong southerly winds, a number of the hoopoes butterflying their way north fly beyond their normal breeding range.
Many of these ‘overshoots’ reach Britain, delighting birdwatchers and the general public alike. According to the scientific journal British Birds, almost 7,000 hoopoes have been spotted here across nearly 60 years of record-keeping.
This century, intriguingly, the number of overshoots has markedly increased. In the noughties, an average of 93 hoopoes graced Britain each year. In the 2010s, the annual mean rose to 120, and during 2020–23, it reached 153.
In 2025, an unprecedented influx smashed the species’ personal best of 218, set in 1968. On headlands, golf courses and lawns, hundreds of hoopoes were seen by thousands of people.
Week by week, Chris Batty of the Rare Bird Alert information service kept a running count of the record arrival. His stats reveal that between 11 March and 3 July, hoopoes were seen at 296 locations across 51 counties. On 23 March, 17 birds were on the Isles of Scilly alone. Even more remarkably, Chris noted that “several hoopoes lingered into the summer, with at least eight reported holding a territory and singing across seven counties, from Kent to Carmarthenshire”.
Such an unprecedented level of breeding behaviour makes us wonder if overshooting could result in a species permanently expanding its range. Alexander Lees, author of Vagrancy in Birds, thinks this is plausible.
“Should some migrants find suitable habitat, they may be encouraged to stay. Such overshooting movements may therefore be fundamental to facilitate northward expansion of southern species in a warming climate.”
Hoopoes, then, could perhaps colonise our ever-warmer Britain, something already achieved by Cetti’s warblers, little egrets and other Mediterranean species. The hoopoe certainly has form as a British breeder.
“There are 40-odd breeding records dating back to at least 1835, comprising short bursts of breeding activity followed by lengthy absences,” says Mark Eaton from the Rare Breeding Birds Panel.
“The most recent breeding pair, which raised four young in Leicestershire in 2023, came 27 years after the previous breeding event in Monmouthshire. Before that, we go back to 1977 when, remarkably, there were four pairs spread across southern England.”
The possibility of the hoopoe setting up home here has received formal scientific consideration. In 2015, Malcolm Ausden, principal ecologist at the RSPB, led research on the impact of climate projections on Britain’s birdlife.
This concluded that the prospect of colonisation by the hoopoe was ‘medium’ – less likely than species such as great and cattle egrets, which are currently establishing themselves here, but more likely than the return of former breeders such as the Kentish plover. A decade on, Malcolm thinks that assessment is still broadly accurate.
“The hoopoe’s recent breeding in Leicestershire and the re-establishment of a small breeding population in the Netherlands suggest that this bird may become a future feature of the British countryside,” he says.
But permanent breeding is far from given. Published in 2020, the European Breeding Bird Atlas 2 reveals that hoopoes no longer nest in many areas towards their northern range limit across northern France, Belgium and Germany.
This, Malcolm cautions, “is the opposite to what would be expected in a warming climate”. He sees a parallel with “other bird species that favour open, less-intensively managed habitats, such as European serin and crested lark, which have also declined towards their northern range-edge in western Europe”.
For such species, it seems any benefits of a warmer climate are being overridden by other factors, including a reduction in habitat suitability, says Malcolm.
“Alongside possibly suffering from issues on their wintering grounds and during migration, this might be a factor reducing the ability of hoopoes to expand their range.”
Mark shares Malcolm’s uncertainty: “Like many farmland bird species dependent on finding large invertebrates in the ground to feed on, and suitable holes in trees to nest in, hoopoes have suffered from the impacts of agricultural intensification,” he says. This is slowing their arrival, and could prevent it.
On balance, this would be unfortunate. Clearly, manifestations of global heating are fundamentally disconcerting. Yet if Britain’s climate is becoming more suitable for hoopoes, it follows that this (and other) species may be losing breeding grounds further south.
“This puts a responsibility on us to nurture arriving species and ensure our countryside is well managed so that both existing and arriving species can flourish,” says Mark.
By choosing to support land managers who maintain or create insect-rich habitats across our countryside, we can help the prospects of hoopoes and other open-country birds, and give our grandchildren the best chance of enjoying real-life Tittifers – without having to visit the Mediterranean.
