One of Britain’s rarest birds has been spotted serveral times during the summer at The Waterside.

According to newspaper reports, The bittern has had its best year on record in 2011. The numbers of breeding males has topped 100 for the first time since it came back from extinction in 1997. Conservationists said the results of the latest survey of breeding males, which experts are able to count from their distinctive ‘booming’ calls, revealed there were 104 birds across England, up from 11 just 15 years ago.

The bird was prized as a medieval banquet dish in the past and its numbers were further hit by hunting and the loss of its reedbed habitat as wetlands were drained, actually became extinct in the UK in 1886. 

It managed to recolonise the Norfolk Broads in 1911, but while numbers rose until the 1950s they then crashed once more to a low point in 1997.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said the population increase in recent years was down to focused conservation efforts to create and maintain habitat for the species – with measures put in place up to 20 years ago now paying off.