Resourceful hunters deserve respect

THERE SEEM to be plenty of spotted flycatchers around this year. These little brown birds, with streaked pale breasts and little spots on their heads, are summer visitors to our shores.

Spending the winter in southern Africa, they are among the last migrants to arrive here. They breed quite late in the year; when there are plenty of insects for their babies to eat. Although they like wooded gardens, they don’t attract attention to themselves and are often overlooked. The resourceful little hunters deserve to be better known.

Flycatchers earn their crust by preying on insects. Swallows and swifts fly around with wide-open gapes, scooping up their prey, like vacuum cleaners mopping up dust. It’s a catch-all, highly effective technique and the swallows have developed swept-back wings and long tails to make their aerial trawling more effective. Flycatchers do things differently. Precision hunters, they selectively target individual insects. A flycatcher will perch on a branch, waiting for a victim to come within range. Then the bird sallies forth, seizes the insect in the air, and returns with it to the perch. This calls for co-ordination and precision flying of the most advanced kind, a miniature version of the peregrine falcon ‘stooping’ on a flying pigeon. The farther away the insect is from the perch, the more difficult the catch; flycatcher sorties of up to 25 metres have been recorded. Hunting is easiest during the heat of the day, when most insects are on the wing but flycatchers can catch moths under street-lights at night. In optimum conditions, an insect is caught every 18 seconds or so.