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But then suddenly, Graeme's efforts pay off as we sight a stonechat, the feathered fiend who had evaded us earlier, sitting happily atop a fence post.

Land-sparing urban areas are breeding grounds for birds that lay many eggs, use open nests more frequently, and have short life cycles, such as stonechats, chiffchaffs and crested larks.

Ornithologist Barbara Hall from the University of Groningen and her colleagues, for example, studied European stonechats, small songbirds that they caught and then bred in captivity.

The stonechat is “the very acme of alertness.”

There were stonechats and whinchats then as now.