With 212,440 finches spotted on Saturday, the annual ‘bird counting day’, this species has overtaken the starling (134,859) as the most common bird in the Netherlands for the first time since counting took place in 1989, says the Volkskrant.

The shake-up is the result of an ‘invasion’ of finches from southern Sweden who were making a pit-stop in the Netherlands en route to warmer southern climes, the paper says.
A record 584,219 bird-spotters took part in Saturday’s count.