Four years ago I wrote about a visit I paid to the Nene Washes in Cambridgeshire to help release some corncrake chicks into this great wilderness where it was hoped that some of them would return and breed.

Corncrakes used to be quite common birds in the hay meadows of Britain — small rusty-red birds whose creaking calls would keep farmworkers awake at night. They still call on summer nights in a few places in the North West of Scotland and the West of Ireland, but they are practically extinct in England. They were destroyed by the change to early, mechanised cutting of the hay, which wrecked their nests and killed them.

Release of the chicks began in earnest on the RSPB reserve in the Washes in 2003, and I took part the following August. We had 11 streaky, bright-eyed chicks, with long legs, all ringed, in soft white cotton bags. They had been reared at Whipsnade Zoo, and then brought up to the reserve for acclimatisation.

We opened the bags gently one by one, and each time a small head peered out and glanced around. A moment later it shot out and ran like mad into the tangled vegetation. Would any of these delightful chicks ever be seen again? That was the big question.

Well, a few days after I was there two unringed chicks were seen running in front of a tractor. It looked as if one of the chicks released in 2003 had returned in 2004 and bred, and that these were its offspring.

Since then there has been a slow recolonisation. This summer a record number of 12 male corncrakes were calling there. It is virtually impossible to find their nests, but if males have returned, females have no doubt returned too. So some of these males have probably paired and bred.

The RSPB has trapped 11 corncrakes on the Washes in the past four years. Nine of them were birds that they had released, identified by their rings, but two were unringed. These were probably birds that were hatched here. At the same time, working with the crofters in Scotland, the RSPB have managed to increase the numbers there, with about 1,100 birds calling in the summer now. (They go back south of the Sahara in autumn.)

I have watched them on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. There they lurk and call in the lily beds, but if one is patient one sees them pop up their orange and grey heads from time to time. From now on, with luck, people in England will have a better chance of hearing — and even seeing — them again.

derwent.may@thetimes.co.uk