Check up on more unusual visitors

IF YOU feed the birds in your garden you should be keeping a close eye on them because at this time of year unusual species can turn up.

Many small birds gather into flocks in winter and roam the countryside in search of food. Sometimes these flocks are of a single species and sometimes of several species – although in the mixed flocks the birds are usually related to each other. Finch species are liable to make up one flock and tits another, but it’s unusual to find finches and tits in the same flock.

Towards the end of the winter these roaming flocks are getting rather desperate because all the easily available food has been used up. This is when birds that are usually rather wary of humans can be forced by hunger to visit gardens. Then they quickly learn by watching the resident robins and blue tits that bird feeders and bird tables are a source of food.

The first time this happened in my garden this winter was about three weeks ago. I was idly watching siskins, goldfinches and linnets feeding on a niger seed feeder when it suddenly occurred to me that there were a couple of birds that were neither siskins nor linnets. They were rather nondescript little brown things so I got my binoculars out to have a closer look.

One distinctive feature was a white mark behind the shoulder. It was like the Nike logo, a sort of comma lying on its back. This identified the birds as redpolls. One of the problems with bird-watching at this time of year is that many species don’t really look like the illustrations in your bird book because they are in dowdy winter plumage. If you look up a redpoll the bird will have a red cap and a reddish flush on its breast. The ones that visited my feeder had no sign of red, even through the binoculars, and it was only that distinctive white wing flash that allowed identification..

There are quite a lot of birch woods near my house with some alder. Normally redpolls spend the winter foraging for the small seeds of these trees. They also survive quite well in forestry plantations. But the wild tree seeds must be running out, forcing these normally rather shy birds to queue up behind the siskins, which are a related species with similar feeding habits, and learn the art of extracting niger seed from a feeder.

A couple of days ago something similar happened. I have a wire feeder that holds three or four of those seed-studded fat balls. I was watching a couple of coal tits feeding on it when one of them edged round the feeder so I could see it more clearly and I realised there was something odd about it. It had a very long, slim tail and it was, course, a long-tailed tit.

Again, the bird looked rather shabby and dowdy compared to a book illustration, but the profile of a little round body with a long spike of a tail was unmistakable. The next day there were two of them on the feeder, though I saw no sign of a flock.

Long-tailed tits are not, in fact, tits. They belong to another closely related family. However, they don’t seem to realise this themselves and quite often form mixed flocks with other tit species in winter. The reason they are infrequent visitors to bird table is not that they’re particularly rare birds, it’s because they are pretty dedicated insect eaters compared to the true tits and only resort to seeds, or fat balls, when little else is available.

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