As the trees that surround our garden get fully clothed with summer leaves, so many of the birds all but disappear, and I have to rely on songs and calls in order to identify many of them – not a strong point of mine, but I’m learning. The dawn chorus continues through this month, though it’s beginning to tail off as parent birds have so much work to do; it’s a good opportunity to listen to what’s there, and you can look up birds on the RSPB web site and listen in to recordings of their songs and calls.
Many of our commoner birds continue to visit the feeders – blue and great tits, chaffinches and house sparrows, even the great spotted woodpecker. Others are now absent – it’s been ages since I saw a nuthatch, for example – preferring to feed on the insect life that abounds now in the trees. Summer visitors like warblers rarely if ever come to garden feeders, and our blackcap that was so regular through the winter (until quite recently blackcaps were only here in summer) has now abandoned us. I’m not good at distinguishing between the various warblers, blackcaps excepted, and many of them, if glimpsed at all, get noted down as LBJ’s (Little Brown Jobs).
By and large we don’t get any rarities, though a peregrine falcon flew high overhead the other day. Unusual birds generally turn out to be plumage variations in familiar birds – blackbirds that are partly white, for example, or chaffinches with over-large wing bars. Our basic rule if that if we see a really strange bird we can’t identify, it’s a chaffinch, especially if we can only half see it through the leaves. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when it comes a bit closer and we can get a better look, that’s exactly what it turns out to be. We get bullfinches regularly, very handsome birds, especially the male; we’re also sometimes confused just by seeing a bullfinch from an unusual angle!
Young birds often differ in plumage from the parents, and at this time of the year that can be another source of confusion. Young blue and great tits are much the same as the adults but with a lighter, greyer plumage till their first moult; young blackbirds are brown and spotty, but not to be confused with the much more spotty song thrush.
A word of advice regarding young birds: you can often find very young bundles of feathers hopping about the garden looking quite helpless and vulnerable, and people worry that they might have fallen out of the nest or been abandoned. If they’re fledged, then they’ve left the nest. They may not look as though they can fly, but they can, even if not very well. And the parents may well be out of sight, but they’ll be around. Of course they are vulnerable, and some will be lost to hawks, magpies, squirrels or cats – that’s life and nature, unfortunately. But the parents will do their best to protect them; keep an eye on them by all means, but basically leave them be.
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