For the first time in more than three decades the lesser spotted woodpecker has been recorded in woodlands near East Grinstead.
The lesser spotted is the rarest of Britain’s woodpeckers and it is thought only 600 breeding pairs remain in the UK.
Ecologists used artificial intelligence (AI) to help identify the woodpecker’s call on more than 1,300 hours of field recordings taken last year on the William Robinson Gravetye Estate.
The birds have been in decline since the 1980s and are on the UK red list of birds of conservation concern.
Dr James Whitehead and a team from the University of Sussex set up 37 acoustic monitoring stations across Sussex and took recordings every 10 minutes throughout the year.
The Gravetye Estate was the only site that captured a call of the lesser spotted woodpecker, a discovery Whitehead calls “very exciting”.
