Brambling

Lovely to see in our back garden this morning a male brambling in more or less full summer plumage. Whereas it might be possible to confuse winter-plumage bramblings, females especially, with the chaffinches with which they flock, the male in summer is quite unmistakeable, and very attractive.

We've had only very small numbers of bramblings among our quite large flocks of chaffinches, and I don't suppose we'll have them with us much longer; they'll be heading north to breed in Scandinavia and across to Siberia. There are very occasional breeding records in the UK, mostly with a north-eastern bias, but the fact that this one was already in breeding plumage does not suggest bramblings breeding in Welshpool in 2014!