Springwatch British Wildlife: Accompanies the BBC 2 TV series. Stephen Moss
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wagtails also like water, but of a more sedate kind: they breed in wet meadows, often alongside cattle, whose dung attracts plenty of insect food. Since World War II, much of this precious habitat has been destroyed by being ploughed up for intensive arable or livestock farming. As a result, the yellow wagtail is a much less common sight than it used to be.
Unlike its two relatives, the yellow wagtail migrates south after breeding, heading across the Bay of Biscay and Spain to Africa, where it spends the winter south of the Sahara among the big game of the African plains. In spring, it returns by a slightly different route, crossing the Sahara in a single hop in just three days, before arriving safely back in southern Britain by the middle of April.
During the winter months, the pied wagtail must often cope with very low temperatures and shortages of food. It increases its chances of survival by gathering in large, noisy roosts, often in very light places such as shopping centres or industrial estates, where it can be warm and safe from predators such as tawny owls.
©Derek Middleton/FLPA
The yellow wagtail is a summer visitor to Britain, breeding on wet meadows.
©Robin Chittenden/FLPA
Britain’s commonest bird, the wren, is also one of our smallest, weighing in at under 10 grams.
Britain’s third-smallest bird, after the even tinier goldcrest and firecrest, is also, perhaps surprisingly, our commonest breeding species. With upwards of eight million pairs, it is comfortably ahead of its nearest rivals, the chaffinch and robin (six million pairs) and blackbird (five million pairs), and much commoner than far more familiar garden birds such as the starling or house sparrow.
So if wrens are so common, how come we hardly ever see one? Their lack of visibility is mainly down to their shy and skulking habits. Unlike other garden birds, wrens prefer to shun the limelight, rarely venturing out into the open. They are far more likely to be glimpsed as they root around at the base of a shrubbery, or potter about a rockery, in both cases on the lookout for tiny insects, which they can grab with that short but sharp and pointed bill. It takes skill to notice a wren, and patience to get more than a brief glimpse, but if you do put in the effort, it is definitely worth it, for the wren is one of our most attractive breeding birds.
Its main feature is definitely its distinctive shape. Wrens are short and plump, with a cocked tail, which it holds up at a 45-degree angle from its body, and with short legs and a really subtle but beautiful plumage. Shades of brown, buff and black combine to give an overall chocolate-brown appearance. In flight, it whirrs along as if powered by clockwork, its tiny wings simply a blur. That small size conceals a hefty build, though, as a wren may weigh as much as 10 grams (⅓ oz), about twice that of the slender goldcrest.
As with so many small and elusive birds, by far the best way to discover wrens is by listening for their sound. The male wren utters the most extraordinary song for a bird so small: a series of very loud notes and phrases, gathering speed and usually featuring a trill, once described as ‘like an opera singer giving her all at the end of the aria’. No other small bird sings quite so loudly! They also have a distinctive, metallic ‘ticking’ call.
Wrens sing mainly in spring, often from a prominent position such as a fence post or the top of a shrub. At this time of year, the male is also very busy, as he has to build as many as half-a-dozen different nests. Known as ‘cock’s nests’, these are carefully inspected by the female before she chooses the best one in which to lay her clutch of five or six tiny eggs. In this way, she tests out the male’s commitment to her, and also picks the nest least likely to be discovered by a passing predator.
Wrens are not only found in gardens. They have colonised a greater range of habitats than any other songbird, including woods, hedgerows, farmyards, moorland, coasts and, most amazingly for a bird with such limited powers of flight, offshore islands. The isolated populations on Scottish islands such as the Hebrides, Shetland, Fair Isle and, most notably, the remote archipelago of St Kilda, have all evolved sufficiently to be considered separate and distinct races of the species. Indeed, the St Kilda wren – darker, larger and even louder than its mainland cousin – has a good claim to be a separate species, which would make it by far Britain’s rarest bird.
The wren’s ability to colonise new places is a legacy of its distant past. In fact, the wren is the only originally North American species to have colonised most of Europe and Asia. Back in its ancestral home, it is known as the ‘winter wren’, to distinguish it from 70 other species, including the cactus, marsh, sedge and canyon wrens.
©Mike Lane/FLPA
A robin in snow – one of the classic images of the British winter.
Without any doubt, the robin is Britain’s favourite bird. No other species – not the cheeky blue tit, the majestic golden eagle or the stately swan – can ever come close to it in the nation’s affections. This is almost certainly because the robin is not only attractive in appearance but also confiding in its habits. Tameness goes hand in hand with the robin, and it is often known as ‘the gardener’s friend’ because it will follow you around as you dig up a flowerbed.
Of course, none of this is designed to win our affections. Robins are tame because they see an easy way to get food: as we turn over the soil, so worms and other small creatures come to the surface – easy pickings for the robin. And what about that beautiful orange-red breast? It may look attractive to us, but to rival robins it is nothing less than war paint, a flash of colour designed to ward off rivals that might take over the incumbent’s territory.
If a rival should dare to intrude into a robin’s space, all hell breaks loose. Robins are pugnacious little creatures and will fight – sometimes to the death – to keep their right to breed in a particular place. They need to: most robins will survive only one or two winters, which means they may get just one chance to breed and pass on their genes to future generations. So this is a life-or-death battle in more ways than one.
Yet, despite their unsocial habits, which in human terms would win them an ASBO, we still love our robins. Its place in folklore is assured, and it is by far the most frequent creature to appear on our Christmas cards – a legacy of the days when the Victorian postmen wore red uniforms and were nicknamed ‘robins’.
A scientist named David Lack, in the middle years of the twentieth century, was the first to discover much of the truth about the robin. Lack had the bright idea of putting different-coloured rings on the legs of the robins in his study area, which meant he could tell individual birds apart from one another. He also conducted a number of radical experiments, such as putting a stuffed robin in another bird’s territory – it was promptly and viciously attacked! Lack wrote a bestselling book, The Life of the Robin, and later made a famous film with the BBC, entitled The Private Life of the Robin, which publicised his work to an audience of millions.
Despite this, several misconceptions remain about this familiar garden bird. One is that it is only the males that have a red breast – in fact, male and female robins are identical, and it is the juvenile birds that appear brown and speckled. Another is that robins behave the same wherever they are – yet continental European robins are a shy bird found mainly in woodlands, rather than gardens.
The robin’s song is among the sweetest and most attractive of all our songbirds: a plaintive series of tuneful phrases, delivered carefully, neither fast nor slow. Understandably, most people assume that only male robins sing, as with other songbirds, yet the female robin will also sing to defend her territory, especially outside the breeding season. Both male and female