April's Birds in Ashtead

9th April

Male Blackcap

Rare visit to Ashtead Park. It makes an interesting alternative to the Common and is surprisingly extensive, well wooded, with two large and two small lakes. Plenty of birdlife, including half a dozen blackcaps (aka the poor man's nightingale), which are among the first of the returning migrants. Just as it says on the tin, they have a jet black cap (rusty red in the female) and a wondrous song, a bit like a robin's, only much richer and louder. Plenty of mallard, moorhen and Canada geese on the water and, in the woods, green and great spotted woodpeckers, dozens of jackdaws, chaffinches - and the inevitable ring-necked parakeets.

14th April

Phone call from a friend who lives on the edge of the Common who'd seem a pair of kestrels mating in the vicinity of the old fire-damaged area (now re-christened the Place of the Phoenix), which means we should look out for youngsters in a month or so.   Also reported a sighting of a buzzard over the Common, for about the fourth time in a month.

Kestral

15th April

Mistle Thrush

Awakened at 05.15 by thunder, lightning and heavy rain which continued for 15 minutes or so - and all the while a mistle thrush was singing in lower Ashtead. They're known as 'storm cocks' because they sing in wet and stormy weather when other birds are silent, but this was a bravura performance if ever there was one.

April 20th

All our regular warblers are now back from Africa where they wintered and are filling Ashtead Common with their singing. Chiffchaffs were the first to return, on 15th March - they're rarely a day earlier, rarely a day later - followed in the weeks since by blackcaps, willow warblers, whitethroat, lesser whitethroat and garden warblers.. All have distinctly different songs, though in the dawn chorus which enlivens the Common just before and just after sunrise, it takes a practiced ear to identify them all. It's all the harder because they're competing with our native robins, blackbirds, song and mistle thrushes, wrens, blue and great tits and the rest, not to mention the skylarks now resident on the upper Woodfield. Well worth getting up early to hear them.

Whitethroat

April 23rd

Jay

Someone writing in the weekend papers suggested we should adopt the jay as our national bird and celebrate it today, St George's Day, on the grounds that the acorns buried by jays every autumn produced some of the oaks which gave Britain its maritime supremacy. Personally, I'd rather stay with the robin, which has the sweetest of songs, is very tame with humans (if you feed it with mealworms when you're gardening, it will sometimes come to your hand), but stands up for itself in a very English sort of way when threatened with attack.

29th April

You don't have to venture far on Ashtead Common these days to see and hear lots of birds. This morning, for example, there were 16 different species - and 1 deer - between the level crossing and the Rye Brook, including skylarks, blackcaps, whitethroats, song thrushes, goldfinches, jays and ring-necked parakeets.