A Songbird Serenade

Sedge Warbler, Standlake Common 2020

April and May are my two favourite months of the year. Spring in the garden after the winter rest is always an exciting time with a wonderful sequence of fresh bloom bringing a sense of new life and renewal to the garden. It’s also the best time of year for bird photography. While the more leisurely autumn passage probably holds more promise in terms of rarities, the shorter spring passage has the big photographic advantage of the birds being in summer plumage.

This year, of course, has been very different. The national emergency we all face has, by necessity, limited our travel to a very great extent. Normally at this time of year I would be watching the bird report services and planning day trips of anything up to several hundred miles. To be honest I thought that I would find the limitation of local spring birding very tough but in fact I’ve actually enjoyed not having the pressure to twitch and instead just focusing on local birds close to my door step. Its felt altogether much more leisurely and relaxing. Being a bit, ok a lot, of a nerd I keep endless bird spreadsheets. I have one that records the first sightings of the various key spring migrants each year and it’s been great fun using this to predict what I should be expecting to come into my local patch. The records over the past few years have been remarkably consentient in terms of the order of appearance and the first date with a spread of just a few days.

I set myself the challenge this year of trying to improve my bird song and call recognition skills. A combination of poor hearing and a total lack of patience have not helped in the past but some two years ago I bit the bullet and got hearing aids which have proved pretty revolutionary. When I first went to see the audiologist he asked me what I hoped to achieve and I said that I wanted to be able to hear grasshoppers reeling. Luckily, I managed to avoid saying that I wanted to hear groppers, the nickname birders use for them, as I suspect that this may have been misconstrued!  I very pleased to say that I can now hear groppers reeling!

My song recognition skills also seem to suffer from what I would term poor acoustic memory, i.e. I struggle to recognise a call or song if I have not heard it for many months. The other issue I have is picking out a particular birds song or call when there is a whole cacophony of song taking place. It’s so easy in the winter when, say, Robin or Song Thrush is the only bird that’s signing but when you are being serenaded by 4 or 5 different species of warbler at the same time I find it to be a very different manner. 

Warblers phase their arrival which certainly helps.  Chiffchaffs, apart from a few hardy overwintering birds, are normally first in around early to mid-March. They are soon joined by Blackcaps and Willow Warblers and then the more tardy travellers such as Garden Warblers start to arrive in mid to late April.

Willow Warbler, Standlake Common 2020

Some birdsong is so distinctive that when heard clearly identification is easy. Luckily, the two warbler species that are most similar in appearance and that can be troublesome to separate without a clear view, Chiffchaff and Willow Warbler, have very different and distinctive song. I find Blackcap and Garden Warbler the hardest to separate. With even a partial view separation of the two is very straightforward but if you can only hear the warbler it’s much harder. It helps that Blackcap come in first as you can familiarise yourself with their song but I still find that telling the two apart just by song is something I have to relearn each year. My best tip is that, to me at least, the Garden Warbler song always seems very hurried compare to the blackcap and also tends to lack the more flutey notes. Having said that I still make mistakes, mainly because I jump to a conclusion too soon rather than patiently wait for a full recital. I’m not sure if its just that I’m spending more time locally this spring but, subjectively at least, there seems to be many more Garden Warblers on the local patch than past years.

 

Garden Warbler, Standlake Common 2020

Mrs Blackcap, Standlake Common 2020

The other species that can sometimes be troublesome to separate on song are Sedge and Reed Warbler. Again their appearance is very different such that identification is easy with a clear view. The issue is that they often share the same reed bank habitat where they are completely obscured. Again my poor acoustic memory lets me down and I have to play the song from an app to myself each year before they arrive to remember the difference. Both have strange garbled songs but Reed tends to be much more monotone and lacks the higher frequency excursions of the Sedge Warbler. If, however, the signing is coming from a tree you can pretty much guarantee its Sedge unless you are lucky enough to have found something much rarer such as a Blyth’s Reed Warbler.

Reed Warbler, Standlake Common 2016

Two other common spring warblers, Common and Lesser Whitethroat have fairly easily recognised short scratchy songs but yet again I have to play them to myself to relearn them before the first arrivals.

 

Grasshopper Warbler, Otmoor 2019

The final comparatively common warbler, Grasshopper, has such a distinctive song that unless you are fortunate enough to stumble on something very rare, identification is easy. On first hearing a Grasshopper Warbler in song it is very easy to conclude that you are listening to an insect rather than a bird. The song is often likened to the fast clicking of a fisherman’s reel and varies in strength remarkably as the bird rotates its head in song.

I can see all of the above warblers on my local patch except Grasshopper which requires a trip to Farmoor or Otmoor both of which are, sadly,  out of bounds for me until the lockdown eases.

The combination of fine sunny weather and having much more time on my hands than usually means that I’m spending many hours working in and enjoying the garden. 

We have a late summer hot border planted with perennial lobelias, dark leaved dahlias and other hot flowered plants. The dahlias and lobelias are only marginally hardy in our climate and a cold bitter winter can kill them off. So each later autumn I lift the plants and tubers and store them in pots in my heated greenhouse. I’ve just finished planting them out again and am really looking forward to the dazzling display of yellows, purples and reds that they provide from July onwards.

Ten hanging baskets are potted up and in location. The plants always look a bit straggly after their winner in the greenhouse but will soon recover to fill the baskets with summer flower.

The mild sunny early spring has produced one of the best showings of fruit blossom I can remember. The strawberries have also benefited from their usual late winter dressing with composted horse manure and are absolutely covered in flower.

Our elderly apple tree

We have a cooking apple tree in our garden which is very variable in its fruit yield as befits a very elderly tree but this year it was absolutely covered in the most blossom in the ten years we have lived here so fingers crossed. I believe it is a remnant of the substantial orchard that use to cover the land where Mick’s and our other neighbours houses now sit as witnessed by deeds and documents we have dating back to when the old part of our cottage was built around 1700.

Stay safe everyone!