The red backed shrike - also known as the "butcher bird"
Following months of secrecy, hushed conversations, cloaks and daggers we can at last reveal that there is a new bird nesting in England.
The red backed shrike last bred in the UK over in East Anglia in the early 1990s.
But it has now returned to breed on Dartmoor with a hardy pair raising three youngsters.
They are fascinating birds. I saw one of the last breeding pairs in the late eighties over in Suffolk.
I clearly recall, even after 20 years, the male perched on a thorn bush gently flexing its silky black talons.
Although they are passerines, in the same group of birds as our robins and blackbirds, they are also keen-eyed, sharp-billed predators that eagerly hunt small mammals, large insects and lizards. This is remarkable for a bird no bigger than your hand.
They also have a habit that would see them at home in a 70s Hammer House of Horror flick. After catching their prey they often store it for later by impaling the hapless victim on a spike, be that a thorn or barbed wire fence. This rather gothic behaviour gave rise to their widespread title as "butcher birds".
If you go back 50 years, red backed shrikes were not uncommon in England. Their general decline is something of a mystery, but the population is very much on the edge of its European range.
Dartmoor - an ideal "bridgehead" for the species to re-colonise
But we do know, that as they became scarcer their eventual fate was exacerbated by the unwanted attention of egg collectors who, in their fevered obsessions appeared to prize the shrikes' eggs above those of other birds.
Although egg collecting has been consigned largely to a paltry footnote in the history books, there are still a small number of people willing to go to great lengths to lay their hairy palms on the eggs of rare species. And shrikes, we believe, are still near the top of their lists.
The first news that the shrikes had settled came back in May 2010.
Knowing they were immediately under threat, the RSPB, local birders from the Dar