Back from the dead: Could wolves and wild boar roam Britain again?

This is a bird of superlatives: it is our tallest breeding species and has the longest wingspan, at almost 2.5 metres. It's an elegant grey with a bundle of tail feathers like a Victorian bustle, and its sonorous bugling calls can be heard up to six kilometres away. The first cranes to breed in this country for 400 years were at Hickling Broad in 1979. Their location was kept a secret and over the next two decades their numbers rose to about 40, with four pairs of breeding birds. "There's an aspiration to bring cranes back to another part of the UK apart from Norfolk as they haven't thrived there," says RSPB spokesman Grahame Madge. The organisation is carrying out a feasibility study at present to determine which areas would suit the cranes best. The birds will eventually come from east Germany, which has more cranes than the habitat can support and will be brought over as eggs and reared here until their release.