July's Birds in Ashtead

9th July 2009

Nuthatch

Nuthatches appear to be enjoying a successful breeding season on Ashtead Common and in the space of an hour’s walk one can hear them in seven or eight different locations. They’re smart, stocky little birds, like miniature woodpeckers, with slate grey backs and orange-pink underparts, not easy to see whilst the trees are in leaf as they move swiftly from trunk to trunk. But they have a loud, distinctive, Morse code-like call – dit-dit, di-di-di-di-dit,dit-dit. They’re sometimes confused with treecreepeers, which also breed on the Common but in much smaller numbers, though the two are very different. Treecreepers are smaller and slimmer, have brown and white streaked plumage, and a call so high-pitched the human ear can’t always hear it. Both attach themselves to the bark of trees looking for food, but whereas nuthatches move up and down, treecreepers move only upwards.

23rd July 

After six months of magical mornings, the dawn chorus is virtually over for another year – and the lady who’s been awaked by birdsong at 4.30am (if it’s the same one that used to wake me up, it’s a blackbird) can sleep on uninterrupted.

Blackbirds are perhaps the most beautiful singers in the chorus - excluding nightingales, of course, which weren’t heard in Ashtead this year. They’ve been singing daily since the beginning of February and some will have reared three broods by now, so they’re entitled to a rest. So, too, song thrushes, which have almost stopped singing; neither bird will resume until the middle of winter, with occasional ‘outbreaks’ during the autumn. Among the few birds which continue singing throughout the year, wrens have the brightest, dunnocks the briefest and robins the sweetest of songs.

NB Anyone suffering withdrawal symptoms can listen to the dawn chorus by visiting www.gardenbird.com, which shows a range of DVDs and CDs to help identify the songs of different birds.