What birds might I see in an English country garden?

I seem to have inadvertently duplicated this article and then edited it. The original with my garden “list” can be found here.

Reader John S asked me to put together a report on the topic of what birds we are likely to see in our gardens here in the village of Cottenham a few miles north of Cambridge. I suspect there are a few of you who will have spent an hour back in January counting species for the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch and so hopefully there are others would be interested to know what they might see.

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Redpoll

Of course, which of our feathered friends turns up in your garden is down to many different factors, the size and layout of your garden, tree and other plant species, the presence of cats, whereabouts you are relative to patches of woodland, farmland, and whether or not the visitors find a useful supply of food in the form of berries on your bushes, seed feeders and bird tables, coconut shells full of suet, and whatever else you might put out to attract them.

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Blue Tit

Some birds will arrive in great numbers to feast on fatballs for instance. Most of us have been perplexed to see expensive fatballs disappear in a matter of minutes when a flock of starlings turn up. Other food, such as nyjer seeds in a specialist feeder will draw in Goldfinches and occasionally for some Redpolls. Sunflowers seeds with the husk intact, sometimes referred to as black sunflower hearts, will keep Greenfinches, Blue Tits, Great Tits, Coal Tits, and Long-tailed Tits busy, and if the nyjer seeds run out the Goldfinches too.

wren titchwell
Wren

Robins, Blackbirds, Wood Pigeons, Collared Doves, Dunnocks, will spend much of their time pecking around under the feeders, although the Blackbirds will join Mistle and Song Thrushes plucking insects from the lawn. And, Thrushes will famously grab snail shells and smash them on the ground to get at the occupant. If it’s very cold out on the farmland, the winter thrushes – the Fieldfares and Redwings – will come into the warmer more urban areas and attempt to snaffle berries from your bushes and trees much to the consternation of the Blackbirds who will attempt to make them flee.

You might also spot Bramblings during the winter. They are another finch resembling the Chaffinch but brighter and more orange colours. I have heard from people on Broad Lane who see them in their gardens occasionally, but they are more likely to be elsewhere.

Unusual but increasingly common in the winter are Blackcaps, a type of warbler normally considered a summer visitor, but turning up in our gardens from Germany and Eastern Europe rather than heading to the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Speaking of summer, by the time you read this birds that you might see above your garden or heading into your eaves may have started to arrive: House Martins first, then the Swallows that don’t necessarily a summer make, and finally the Swifts. Listen out for Cuckoos too. Certainly houses on The Green backing onto farmland have regular cuckoos visiting for the breeding season.

If you have ants among your plants, you might see Green Woodpeckers, also known as Yaffles for their scoffing call in flight. Ants are the Yaffle’s staple diet, so hold off the powder if you want to see them pecking at the ground in your garden. And, speaking of woodpeckers, there are quite a few Great Spotted Woodpeckers around, which will often come to garden feeders. Of course, if you’re attracting lots of small songbirds to your garden you might also attract predators including Sparrowhawks and less obviously egg-eating Magpies, and chick-chomping Jays. Great Spotted Woodpeckers will also peck into birdboxes to eat baby Blue Tits and the like.

Another reader, Diana S, also pointed out that she’d had Reed Buntings in her garden and had seen Little Grebe and Teal on the reedy pond at the back of her housing estate.

NWT Weeting Heath

We headed to Lakenheath, had a quick stop off to watch a load of F15, Strike Eagles, take off from the RAF base before bypassing RSPB Lakenheath and heading further out to a reserve we had not visited previously – the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Weeting Heath site.

Wren and caterpillar

Weeting Heath (Grid ref: TL 758 884) is right in the middle of The Brecks and one of the lookout hides looks out over arable land while the other has a small pond and lots of well-stocked feeders frequented by woodland birds including the usual array of Goldfinches, Chaffinches, Robins, Dunnocks, Collared Doves, Wrens etc as well Bramblings and Yellowhammers.

Male Brambling

Cross the speedy road and there is a larger woodland patch with a circular walking route through the pines (although Forestry Commission and NWT were felling trees during our visit so some paths were closed off. Anyway, saw the usual array of woodland birds here but also heard Woodlark, which staff had mentioned as having been showing well that week. Back at the main site, I snapped the last of the Bramblings, several Yellowhammers, a Wren eating a caterpillar, and numerous Goldfinches.

Male Yellowhammer

There had been reports of Stone Curlew (Burhinus oedicnemus), and I caught sight of one of the five or so that had been showing. There was also a Kestrel in a lone tree and a solitary Lapwing on the same patch as the Stone Curlew.

Stone Curlew, not a great shot, but first time seen one of these.

Then, I dashed back to the main road when Mrs Sciencebase alerted me to a sighting of a winter buzzard that was in the area, a Rough-legged Buzzard, specifically. Unlike the more common Common Buzzard, the Rough-leg only over-winters occasionally in the UK. Second time she’s spotted one of these ahead of the crowd and we had seen one at Cley in North Norfolk in November 2018. I wasn’t back from the hide quickly enough to get a view of it low down but managed to snap it just before it disappeared into low cloud. Other birders arrived minutes later and never caught a glimpse.

Rough-legged Buzzard

Marsh Harriers courting on the wing

Much to Mrs Sciencebase’s annoyance, I was awake at 6:40am today…her day off. I made a pot of tea, fed the dog, we drank the tea (Mrs Sciencebase and myself, not me and the dog), I then dressed and dashed off to RSPB Ouse Fen before the morning rush hour in the hoping of catching sight of a Bittern or two.

Well, I arrived to see lots of Linnets, Goldfinches, and Reed Buntings about. Skylarks cavorting with the Meadow Pipits, the sound of a couple of Chiffchaff and maybe four or five Cetti’s Warblers calling (I saw at least three of them), a possible Bearded Reedling “pew”, and the occasional boom of a male Bittern, from a couple of places, so perhaps two or more.

However, the big feature of the morning though was the five or six Marsh Harriers (Circus aeruginosus) that were doing their aerial courtship dance. The smaller, more patterned males with their darker heads chase the bigger females with their pale heads through the air and with each approach dive down to reed level. It’s a spectacular sight, be interesting to know how many were successful and whether numbers will rise again on this reserve.

 

Of Marsh Harpoons and Bearded Breasts

Just looking for a nature reserve that I may have missed in our local area when I found a website that discusses the many and varied places you could visit:

The Water of Grafham (Grafham Water), for instance

Then there was Ouse is Washing (Ouse Washes)

Cherries Hinton Chalk Pits (that would be Cherry Hinton)

But, I’m definitely going to RSPB Ouse Fen again where:

The bitters are joined by a support group composed of marsh harpoon hovering above and pretty bearded breasts hanging on the reeds, like small trapeze artists.

Presumably, they’re talking about Bitterns, Marsh Harriers, and Bearded Tits, but I could be wrong…

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A “Bearded Breast” hanging on reeds like a small trapeze artist

The only explanation for such a ludicrously badly written web page I can think of is that they ran the copy through an automatic grammar checker and accepted all changes without reviewing them. However, the site looks like the content is originally from the Cambridge News, so maybe the awful edits were done to make it subtly different from the original material.

Indeed, the original Cambridge news article uses this phrase in talking about the arrival of spring:

Pop on a jumper and some sturdy shoes

the “archive” site has:

Put on a sweater and solid shoes

The  site also talks about “forests” whereas the original Cambridge News pages says “fenland”. As far as I know, there are no forests near Cambridge but plenty of local fenland; woods and spinneys yes, but not forests.

Oh and the Cambridge News talks of:

The bitterns are joined by a supporting cast of marsh harriers that soar overhead and charming bearded tits that cling to the reeds like little trapeze artists.

First (migrant) Chiffchaff of 2019

We heard an over-wintering Chiffchaff (at RSPB Titchwell on New Year’s Day this year, but today (18th March) I’ve just heard and seen the first one that has presumably migrated from Africa for the summer. It was calling with its plaintive, sound-of-the summer, onomatopoeic, metronomic and instantly recognisable ttt-tss-ttt-tss-ttt-tss-tss-tss call.

Snapped it quickly in Rampton Spinney as it was darting from tree to tree and calling in between. The Common Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) is a warbler and almost identical to the Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus), which I think I may have heard briefly on the opposite of this woodland at the beginning of my walk today. Very another sound-of-the-summer.

This is the call of the Chiffchaff. The first sound is the actual recording I made and it’s as you’d hear the bird in woodland or elsewhere. The bird usually repeats its chiff-chaff 11 to 14 times (in my original records, I’ve got 11 on one and 13 on a second sequence).

The second sound you hear in the video is that of the same bird’s call time stretched (slowed down) by about four times and then the frequency halved to take it down an octave in pitch. It reveals otherwise hidden detail in the bird’s call as well as allowing you to hear the echoing of the song from the trees of the woodland. The normal recording sounds cheery and chipper, the slowed down version rather more plaintive and melancholic, perhaps even eerie.

Dartford Warblers at Dunwich Heath

It had been a long time since we visited National Trust Dunwich Heath on the Suffolk coast. It’s a beautiful place and aside from a warden or two in the hut there was barely anyone around, we had the place to ourselves, at least for the first hour and a half of our walk.

Anyway, we parked up, layered up and set off on one of the mapped out circular walks hoping to catch a glimpse of a Dartford Warbler (Sylvia undata). Amazingly, there were a pair flitting about close to the start of the circuit, too quick to photograph, but not 100 metres up the trail, we could see at least three more, and we inched forward, not straying from the footpath, of course, and I got a few snapshots.

You can think of this UK resident species of warbler as really being a North African bird that stretched its range northwards at some time in the past, on to the Iberian Peninsula and up to the British Isles. It can be found in Wales, the South West and in Suffolk (there are thought to be 37 pairs on Dunwich Heath). You occasionally see them on the northern perimeter of neighbouring RSPB Minsmere (seen one once there) and further up the coast on the outskirts of Dunwich Village itself. We didn’t see any more after the initial lucky burst of five or so. But, we did see quite a few Goldcrests and Treecreepers further up the trail and the usual mix of woodland/garden birds, Long-tailed, Great, Blue Tits, Robins, Blackbirds etc.

In the notoriously cold winter of 1962/1963, so I am told, the cold killed off most of the UK’s Dartford Warblers; they are very sensitive to the cold. There were ten left and the current population, which amounts to some 3000 territories is quite an astonishing recovery.

Incidentally, the name of this bird has a rather uncomfortable etymology. Back in less enlightened times ornithologists generally studied new bird species by shooting them and then examining and reporting on them, rather than netting them, ringing them, and setting them free. Two specimens of what eventually became known as Sylvia undata were shot in April 1773 on Bexley Heath near Dartford in Kent. They were examined and described by Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant.

As a footnote, when we got back to base to use the facilities before heading off to RSPB Minsmere (me in the car, Mrs Sciencebase on foot with the pooch), there were four moths showing well in the gents– three Dotted Border (Agriopis marginaria) and a (new to me) Yellow Horned (Achlya flavicornis), pictured below.

Fenland Cranes

UPDATE: 5th November 2025, as I understand it from RSPB’s Rachel there are 85 Cranes on the Ouse Washes.

UPDATE: 21st October 2023 68 now being reported at RSPB Ouse Washes

UPDATE: Species numbers seem to be on the up in East Anglia, with 60+ now as opposed to the 38 or so I first mentioned in the region. Spotted two at RSPB Ouse Fen (Earith) on the dogwalkers’ trail on 17th March 2022, having had a tipoff from Andy Hoy who had seen them on that patch several times for the preceding week or so.

Given this blog post’s title, if you didn’t know me better you might have thought I was going to discuss the interminable civil engineering and construction work that is going on in our vicinity – the construction of the new town of Northstowe and the widening of the A14 road.

But, no the topic is the avian Crane – specifically, the Common Crane (Grus grus). The bird whose scientific name simply means Crane crane, coming from the Latin for crane, funnily enough. It’s another tautonym where that means the name is doubled up to represent the archetype of the family.

Anyway, there are several dozen Common Cranes that spend their time flying between various sites and their surroundings around East Anglia – Namely: RSPB Lakenheath, WWT Welney, RSPB Nene Washes and RSPB Ouse Washes, RSPB Ouse Fen, RSPB Fen Drayton Lakes, Kingfisher’s Bridge Nature Reserve and nearby NT Wicken Fen. Presumably, once airborne, these large and graceful birds can survey a large area of the flatlands and head for whichever patch of wetland they fancy for any given period. I’ve seen them and photographed them from a distance at several of the spots mentioned above.

The largest number I’ve seen at one time is 37, I believe, but proper birders tell me that there are some 45 around and that there may well be at least one courting pair, which is good news for a species that was extirpated from the British Isles by the 17th Century. There is also a tiny breeding population in the Norfolk Broads and the bird was reintroduced to the Somerset levels in 2010.

Today, at least two were dithering about which direction to take over RSPB Ouse Fen (which nestles between the South Cambridgeshire villages of Needingworth, Bluntisham, and Over. It’s a converted gravel quarry site split in two by the River Great Ouse (a tautonym itself given that ouse simply means river, as does the word avon). A large part of this patch land is still active quarry, presumably providing gravel and sand for the aforementioned construction work.

I was walking the Reed Bed Trail, which is on the Over side of the river. Having seen 4-5 Marsh Harriers, a Snipe, and a Green Sandpiper, I was heading back to the car when a couple of birds almost as big as swans came into view, veering back and forth until they went out of sight. They were Common Cranes. Anyway, you might spot these large birds flying over any of the countless fens as they hop between feeding grounds and putative nesting sites.

Not to be confused with that far more common fenland icon, the Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea).

 

Last of the Short-eared Owls

UPDATE: 22 Apr 2019, I wasn’t there but apparently, still Shorties at Burwell Fen.

Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus) like to spend their winters where it’s slightly warmer than their native lands of Iceland, Scandinavia, and Russia. I say warmer, they migrate to northern, eastern, and parts of central southern England especially around the coast. But, they also seem to have favoured NT Burwell Fen this winter.

Got quite close to the Owl photographed above without spooking it, but there was a group of people up ahead who had an even better view when it landed right in front of them, but they decided to blunder ahead and get even closer than 20 metres for their photos, scaring the bird and ruining everybody else’s chance for a closeup.

There have been sightings of six or so Short-eared Owls over the last few weeks. I have seen at most two at one time there in the last few days, but possibly a third. Other photographers and birders there suggest only two remain. They will only be here for a few more days, maybe weeks, the weather and food source will perhaps dictate how much longer they will stay.

Short-eared Owls at Burwell Fen

A 7- or 8-mile hike from NT Wicken Fen car park out through Burwell Fen to The Anchor in Burwell and back via the electric sub-station. Timing was perfect, just ahead of sunset by the time we got to the western side of Burwell Fen, there were about 20 others with cameras waiting for the local Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus) to emerge for their late-afternoon prandials. Reckon we saw three of possibly six that live around this Fen.

Short-eared owl Burwell Fen

Like I say, there were quite a few people on the Fen watching out for owls and hoping for a great photo.

Short-eared owl photographer

Short-eared owl photographers

Oh, and here’s that 7.65 mile route to the pub and back via the owls…

Walking route Wicken to Burwell

Then, there were these snappers who seemed to be snapping me rather than the shortie heading across their bow.

Oh, and one last shot just the sun was sinking and one of the shorties headed off over the Fen.

 

A pair of Snipe at RSPB Fen Drayton

I haven’t yet been to see the Snipe (Gallinago gallinago) living on the edge of our village pond, but a visit to RSPB Fen Drayton today allowed us good views of a pair roosting and then feeding on the little islands right in front of the Coucher Hide there.

Snipe, Gallinago gallinago

This species is incredibly well camouflaged in its normal environment. I spotted the first of two, Mrs Sciencebase the second. A fellow birder couldn’t quite home in on the places we’d seen them until the birds began to move to feed with their classic sewing machine bill action. Not to be confused with the Jack Snipe, which has shorter legs, a shorter bill, is a little smaller, and has more detailed and stronger markings but lacks the central yellow stripe on the crown of its head.

Here’s a shot from the hide of the more distant of the two Snipe we saw. This image is as it came out of the camera, uncropped, with no sharpening or processing, other than to resize for the web to reduce file load. Spot the Snipe!

RSPB Fen Drayton Snipe uncropped

The bird gives its name to the term sniper in reference to how British soldiers in the 18th Century used to hunt the species in India.