Adrift amongst a sea of wheat on an English farm, 4 extremely rare birds have successfully fledged, and are almost ready to strike out on their own.

The successfully raised chicks are Montagu’s harriers, England’s rarest breeding bird, and the news the young ones were flying was herald as an “incredible” accomplishment.

For months, tall predator-proof wire fencing has surrounded the nest, sat in the middle of a private landowner’s field of milling wheat.

Conservationists from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) have worked hand in hand with landowers for years to ensure the harrier clings on.

For six years, no chicks have survived to fledge; an unsustainable trend as the population is incredibly small. Nesting on the ground in wheat fields puts the chicks at risk of predators like foxes, and machines like combine harvesters and crop sprayers.

Populations are much higher in Spain and France, but on Great Britain, each breeding pair has to be monitored from start to finish of the breeding season. In this case, a pair returning from their wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa were spotted moving into a field in an undisclosed part of the country.

Once it was confirmed via drone that they had nested, RSPB sprung into action, installing predator-proof fencing and monitoring cameras.

Channel 4 reported that the fences are marked out with flags so that combines can steer well clear of the nests and the chicks, which strangely don’t seem to give a tweet about the giant, noisy machines of death passing by.

As for the farmer, one might think they’d take issue with the lost crop, but quite the contrary.

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“It’s fantastic to have these amazing birds on the farm and a just reward for the extensive conservation work we have been undertaking for decades,” the farmer who owns the land where this particular nest was located, told the RSPB.

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As the first chicks to successfully fledge in 6 years, these young ones—the males already sporting their iconic “battleship grey” feathers—carry the hope of the British population on their wings.

WATCH the story below from Britain’s Channel 4

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