Garden birds refuse to be boxed in

With a few exceptions, all the birds of town parks and gardens belong to a single branch of the avian family tree. They are known as the ‘passerines’. ‘Passer’ is the Latin for ‘sparrow’ and ‘passerine’ means ‘perching bird’. It’s not a very satisfactory term; owls pigeons, and other non-passerines, also perch.

‘Songbirds’, the alternative name, isn’t any better, because birds of many backgrounds sing. The curlew’s bubbling song evokes the uaigneas of Irish bogs and the cuckoo sings the world’s best-known refrain. Yet neither are ‘songbirds’.