Our garden feeders are proving very popular this winter, and we’ve seen up to fifteen goldfinches at a time, plus great, blue, coal, marsh and long-tailed tits, a nuthatch, chaffinches and a beautiful pair of bullfinches, a very proprietorial robin and - much to the consternation of the other birds - a pair of great spotted woodpeckers. But one of my favourites is a rather undistinguished brown bird that doesn’t visit the feeders, but regularly pecks about underneath, picking up what the other birds drop - and that’s the dunnock.
Dunnocks are brown and grey sparrow sized birds, which is why they have often been called ‘hedge sparrows’. In truth, though, they’re not really sparrows, and have the thin beak associated with insect-eaters, rather than the thick seed-eating bill of the house or tree sparrow. They also have a short but pretty song in season.
Dunnocks feed mostly on the ground, and mostly their dist consists of insects and other invertebrates, plus some berries and fruit - and, of course, bird-table food but generally only the stuff that gets dropped. Though fairly secretive, it’s a common bird, found everywhere in the British Isles (except Shetland and much of Orkney), with gardens, parkland, scrubby heaths and farmland hedges the dunnock’s main habitat. The cup-shaped nest, lined with moss, hair and other soft material, will generally be constructed in a dense bush or hedge, or in a bramble patch, and a garden with some good bushes is most likely to attract breeding dunnocks. Four or five eggs are usual.
The sexes are alike, with streaked brown wings and upper parts, and a grey breast. The head is grey with a brown crown, and there is a brown patch around the eye. While some dunnocks seem to pair in a conventional way, this species is infamous for a degree of infidelity, with some males having several female partners, and some females consorting with more than one male!
With probably something over two million breeding pairs in the UK, this is by no means a rare bird, though it’s often overlooked. It is a resident species, and our British dunnocks do not move around much, though some extra dunnocks may arrive from Scandinavia to spend the winter here.
Glad Jones, from Llandrinio, whom many people will remember with great affection, was a keen garden bird watcher, and always had dunnocks in her garden. She told me the story of a visitor one day who, looking out from her window, said, “That’s a fine old dunnock you’ve got at the top of your garden.” When she looked she could not see any small brown mouse-like birds rootling about, so she was for a moment mystified . . . until it dawned on her that her visitor was referring not to a bird of any sort but to an old fork-like implement, a dung-hook!
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