The New 10p Coin Outnumbers Scotland’s Remaining Capercaillie

Britain now has 7.1 million new 10p coins showing a capercaillie, and the last full survey found 532 of the birds left in Scotland. The Royal Mint began sending the pieces to banks and Post Offices on 25 August 2026, the first time a 10p has carried King Charles III’s portrait into everyday change.

Each tails side shows the world’s largest grouse, a pinewood bird that already died out once in Britain and is on the UK Red List. The Mint’s own line is that the metal flock will outnumber the living one.

The New 10p Outnumbers Every Living Capercaillie

The August batch is 600,000 coins dated 2023 and 6.5 million dated 2026. Added together that is 7.1 million pieces, which the Mint described as just over seven million 10p coins going into circulation. That works out at more than 13,000 metal birds for each bird counted in the 2021 to 2022 national survey.

King Charles coins still make up about 1 percent of the 24.142 billion coins in use across the UK. The 10p is the fourth denomination of his reign to reach tills, after the 5p, the 50p and the £1. Queen Elizabeth II pieces remain legal tender, so the new coins appear only when banks ask for more of a given value.

THE AUGUST 10P RELEASE

A further quantity is being sold over the counter at the Royal Mint Experience in Llantrisant. Rebecca Morgan, a director at the Mint, tied the release to the bird’s status rather than to the portrait on the front.

It’s a stark reminder that more of these coins will enter circulation than there are Capercaillies left in the wild. We hope that by putting this extraordinary bird into millions of pockets and purses, we can spark a nationwide conversation about a species at real risk of vanishing from Britain forever.

Rebecca Morgan, Director, The Royal Mint

Conversation is the easy part. The harder test sits in a few pinewoods in the Cairngorms, where almost every remaining cock still gathers at dawn.

The Wildlife Set Waited Almost Three Years

The 10p design is not a one-off commemorative. On 12 October 2023 the Mint unveiled eight new coin designs for everyday UK money, from the 1p to the £2, and dropped the shield set introduced under Queen Elizabeth II in 2008. All eight reverses were approved by the King and built around British plants and animals.

A repeating pattern of three interlocking Cs, drawn from the cypher of Charles II, runs through the set. Gordon Summers, the Mint’s chief engraver, said it was the first time all eight circulating coins had celebrated nature and wildlife. Anne Jessopp, then chief executive, said the King had seen the designs and that they reflected his conservation work as well as British craft.

The Royal Mint posted the 10p bird itself while the set was still new to collectors.

Did you know that the capercaillie is the world's largest grouse? Found in a very small part of Scotland, it features on His Majesty King Charles III's circulating 10p coin design.

Vote for your favourite of the 8 new designs: https://t.co/oA0lXSuwPY pic.twitter.com/VZU6BLzwGZ

— The Royal Mint (@RoyalMintUK) November 25, 2023

THE EIGHT WILDLIFE REVERSES

• 1p: hazel dormouse
• 2p: red squirrel
• 5p: oak tree leaf
• 10p: capercaillie
• 20p: puffin
• 50p: Atlantic salmon
• £1: bees
• £2: rose, daffodil, thistle and shamrock

The capercaillie reverse is based on an illustration by Mike Langman, a wildlife artist who previously worked for the RSPB and whose bird drawings still appear on reserve signs. In September 2026 Langman wrote that he had been credited and was waiting on a mint copy. A fellow artist told him not to hold his breath. Collector sets of the new designs went on sale the day they were unveiled. The 10p only reached general change on 25 August 2026, almost three years later, because the Mint strikes to demand.

Why the Capercaillie Is on a 10p Coin

The Mint’s 2023 note on the 10p was blunt. The capercaillie lives in a small part of Scotland, already went extinct once in the mid-eighteenth century, and is at risk of going extinct a second time. It is a woodland grouse of old Caledonian pine, not the red grouse of driven moors, and that distinction matters once the coin is read against land use in the same national park.

National winter surveys, repeated every six years, are the figures used for a full population estimate. Lek counts, which tally displaying cocks at dawn, are a partial dataset and a trend tool, not a substitute for that total.

HOW THE BIRD GOT THIS SMALL

1. Mid-eighteenth century: The species dies out in Britain, with woodland loss treated as the main cause.
2. 1837: Birds from Sweden are brought to Perthshire, then to other Scottish pinewoods.
3. 1970s: Around 20,000 birds are thought to remain in Scotland, according to the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust.
4. 1992 to 1994: The first transect-based national survey puts the total around 2,200.
5. 2015 to 2016: The winter survey estimate is 1,114.
6. 2021 to 2022: The estimate falls to 532, the lowest since surveys began, a 52 percent drop from 1,114.

Causes piled up rather than arriving as a single blow. Birds fly into deer fences. Foxes, crows, pine martens and badgers take eggs and chicks. Walkers, dogs and photographers push birds off lek sites. Habitat quality in the field layer under the pines has thinned. By the time the coin was drawn, the living population was already smaller than a large village hall.

Strathspey Climbs While Deeside Stays at Five

The 2026 lek season, coordinated by the RSPB Capercaillie Advisory Officer under a NatureScot licence, produced the first clear uptick in years. 184 lekking males were recorded across Scotland, 41 more than in 2025 and the highest total since 2018, when counters logged 196. The report is careful: cocks do not attend every morning, so 184 is a minimum, not a new national total to replace 532.

The gain was not spread evenly. Strathspey rose from 126 to 165. The Cairngorms National Park held 170 of the 184 counted cocks, 39 more than the year before, about 92 percent of the birds that showed. Deeside stayed at five, matching 2025 and the lowest count on record. Moray and Nairn had two. Easter Ross had 12. Perthshire had none, and no Donside leks were surveyed.

LEKKING MALES BY AREA

The three biggest leks, with 16, 15 and 15 cocks, all sat in Strathspey beside large areas of bog woodland. Counting began from about 15 April, and hens arrived earlier than in 2025. Sightings also came in from ground that surveyors had treated as empty, from upper Deeside to north Morayshire, enough for follow-up after the breeding season but not enough to change the Deeside column.

The report’s conclusion matches the table. Favourable weather and several seasons of habitat work made an increase unsurprising. Peripheral groups remain fragile. Deeside, it said, appears to be declining or, at best, static.

What Moves Bird Numbers

The Strathspey jump sat on forests where managers have cut the field layer with robotic flails, grazed cattle, cut disturbance, and taken down deer fences within 1km of active leks. Those are slow, local jobs. They do not travel in a purse.

Predator pressure is the other lever, and it is the one that splits practitioners. Pine martens are protected. Killing them to save a grouse is a political dead end in much of the park. Researchers instead put out deer carcasses for eight weeks while hens nested, so martens ate carrion instead of eggs.

A three-year Cairngorms trial led by Dr Jack Bamber at the University of Aberdeen, with the University of St Andrews, Forestry and Land Scotland, RSPB Scotland, NatureScot and Wildland Ltd, watched real broods on camera. In fed sites, 85 percent of hens had chicks. In unfed sites the share was 37 percent. Predicted chicks per hen rose from 0.82 to 1.90, more than double. An earlier dummy-nest test had already cut pine marten raids on fake clutches.

WHAT THE CARRION TRIAL CHANGED

• Hens with chicks: 85 percent at fed sites against 37 percent where no carcasses were laid.
• Chicks per hen: 1.90 with feeding against 0.82 without.
• Window: Deer carrion offered for eight weeks only, while nests and young chicks were most exposed.
• Rollout: Fifteen sites were already using the method under the Capercaillie Emergency Plan, with the aim of covering every park site that still had recent hen records by 2026.

Kenny Kortland, who leads the Cairngorms Connect Predator Project, said the work changes how pine martens forage and doubles breeding success. Richard Mason, site manager at RSPB Scotland Abernethy, said the reserve has built the feeding into its year and has watched its own birds recover slowly. Counters there logged 30 lekking males at Abernethy in 2025, up from 20 in 2021. Abernethy held more than 20 percent of the 143 cocks counted in Scotland that spring.

The Capercaillie Emergency Plan, led by the Cairngorms National Park Authority and NatureScot, runs through 2030. It is fence crews, cattle, signs that ask walkers off paths before 8.30am, and meat on the forest floor. It is not a 10p.

A Royal Estate Inside the Last Stronghold

The coin pairs the King with a Highland bird. The geography is tighter than the portrait suggests. Over 80 percent of the remaining birds live in the Cairngorms National Park. Balmoral sits in that park, on Deeside, the same district whose lek total is five.

Balmoral Estate is listed among the landholdings that supplied 2026 lek data, alongside Cawdor, Forestry and Land Scotland, Invercauld, NatureScot, the RSPB, Seafield and Strathspey Estates, and WildLand Cairngorms. The report does not publish a Balmoral-only figure. It does say the Deeside population as a whole is stuck.

Campaigners have been pressing that point for years. Nick Kempe, a former president of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland, argued in 2021 that capercaillie were in effect extinct on Deeside because of land managed for deer and grouse, including muirburn that holds back woodland. Revive, the grouse-moor reform group, has urged the King to move Balmoral off driven grouse and into the kind of pinewood recovery already under way on neighbouring estates.

None of that makes the 10p a fraud. The bird on the tails side is a capercaillie, and the King did ask for wildlife on the national set. It does mean the pocket-sized warning lands in a park where the same family still keeps grouse moor, and where the woodland grouse on the coin is down to five displaying males on the Deeside side. Red grouse and capercaillie are different species. They share a district, and they do not share a future.

Collectors Will Chase the 2023 Date

Finders are already pulling the new 10p from wallets and refusing to spend it. The 2023 stamp is the one that will be chased, because 600,000 pieces dated that year sit beside 6.5 million dated 2026. Both years show the same bird. Only the date separates a common till coin from a scarcer one.

That collector habit cuts against the Mint’s awareness pitch. A coin that stays in a drawer does not meet the next customer. A coin that circulates still cannot mark a fence, move a pine marten, or grow blaeberry under Scots pine. Langman’s drawing is now the most widely handled image of a bird most people in Britain will never see, including, on present counts, anyone waiting at a lek in Perthshire.

The Mint asked the public to check their change. The cocks that still exist will be counted again at dawn next April.

Frequently Asked Questions

What bird is on the new King Charles 10p coin?

A capercaillie, Tetrao urogallus, counted at leks under a Schedule 1 licence from NatureScot because the species is legally protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. Surveyors sit in hides overnight so they can tally displaying cocks from about 4am without flushing them.

When did capercaillie first disappear from Britain?

The species died out in the mid-eighteenth century. Swedish birds were brought to Perthshire in 1837, and later releases seeded other Scottish pinewoods. Every capercaillie now in the UK descends from that reintroduction.

Are Queen Elizabeth II 10p coins still valid?

Yes. The Royal Mint says all UK coins with Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait remain legal tender and stay in active use, a choice it frames as cutting waste, extra metal, and cost during the change of monarch.

What does the edge of the new £2 coin say?

IN SERVITIO OMNIUM, Latin for “In the service of all.” The King chose the line from his inaugural speech on 9 September 2022. The Royal Horticultural Society and the RSPB both supported the wildlife set that carries that edge.

Where can I buy a full set of the wildlife designs?

The official commemorative set went on sale from the Royal Mint on 12 October 2023, priced from £33, the same day the eight reverses were unveiled. Those packaged coins are struck for collectors and are separate from the 7.1 million 10p pieces issued to banks in August 2026.