Dunnock

Spring was certainly in the air today with temperatures rising to 18c in some parts of the country. It is in stark contrast to this time last year where we had snow piled high and freezing conditions!  To have heard any birds singing in that weather would have been a miracle, but this year is different.

Yesterday I saw my first summer migrant, a chiffchaff.  It was happily catching insects, which were in abundance, amongst willow, hazel and conifer trees adjacent to a sewage works.  On the sewage beds were at least thirty pied wagtails, some of the males looked great in their black and white breeding plumage. There were also ten grey wagtails feeding on the myriad of insects that the warm sewage beds had attracted.

But that's not the purpose for this post as the title suggests.  There was another bird singing with a subdued warble like sound.

Hedge sparrow, dunnock, shuffle-wing and hedge accenter are just a few names this unobtrusive garden bird has gone by over the years.  Hedge accenter is now the official name for the bird, but dunnock is the most used by birdwatchers.  The biggest misnomer (and there are a lot in the birding world) is hedge sparrow as the bird isn't even remotely related to the sparrow family.  It got that name by early ornithologists because of its preference to nesting in hedges and finding its main diet, insects, there.

It's a skulking and inconspicuous bird and can be present in gardens, parks, towns and even city centres and mostly go unnoticed. They feed out of sight under hedges, bushes, vegetable plots and flower beds searching out spiders and other small invertebrates.

The tell-tale sign they are present, though, is the high pitched "tseep" call uttered from dense cover but can be delivered on occasion on an open perch.  But the song is the thing to listen out for this time of the year which is a sweet warble like sound.

Their features are also inconspicuous being sparrow sized, slate-grey head and breast, streaked flanks, dark, slender bill and rich brown upper parts.

Dunnock's, like most other birds, are displaying this time of year and it's now to try and get a glimpse of them as they shuffle (hence, shuffle-wing) their wings in flicking movements.