Category: Birds

It’s easier to notice changes when they involve presences rather than absences.  We may be very aware of a new person in our community but we can forget that we haven’t seen old so-and-so around for quite some time, now that you mention it.  It’s the same with our wildlife.  It makes the headline news when charismatic species like red kites, ospreys and white storks are re-introduced into Britain, but how many people realise that in the meantime we’ve lost 70% of our humble house sparrows? 

Sparrows used to be one of our commonest birds. From earliest historical times they thrived around human habitations in cities and farms, to the point of becoming pests. We exported them to the USA in the mid-nineteenth century (a few were released in Brooklyn in 1853) and in no time at all they had spread from coast to coast; indeed, by the 1940s there were more sparrows than people in America. And only 30 years ago in Britain they were still as common as, well, sparrows.  The ‘Cockney sparrow’ was the affectionate nickname for this small, cheeky little bird living alongside us, with its touch of endearing vulgarity.  But there’s been a crash in the population and you can search for them in vain in London now.  A friend of mine used to birdwatch in Hyde Park every day and in ten years he never saw a single sparrow.  What’s happened? 

Scientists have come up with explanations ranging from habitat loss, climate change, improvements in domestic architecture (so fewer nesting holes), growing predator numbers (like magpies and cats), pesticides and air pollution (especially from diesel vehicles); but none of these seems fully convincing or specific to sparrows – why, for example, are there still plenty of sparrows in other big cities like New York and Paris?  One more inventive speculation is that house sparrows are essentially social creatures and if the colony size drops below a certain level they can’t any longer function as individuals, especially as they are also extremely sedentary and localised.  Sparrows don’t migrate, even short distances, to occupy empty niches elsewhere, so they find it hard to recover from a decline brought on by other factors.  Could it be like the human situation in the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda in 1936, when the population had declined to 36 people and they could no longer be self-sufficient so had to be physically evacuated and resettled?

Here in Shingle Street we still have a small colony of house sparrows, I’m glad to say, but they’re getting rarer.  Should we be resettling sparrows here as well as kites and storks?  Could be an interesting negotiation with an export-minded US president.

Jeremy Mynott
July 2025

I was taking a stroll on one of those lovely long midsummer evenings, watching the swallows swooping low over the fields for their final feed of the day.  They were calling occasionally, a gentle veet veet, which is their standard conversational contact call.  But suddenly one gave a much louder, piercing cry and they all instantly scattered as if in a shock-wave and dived for safety.  I looked up and knew what I’d see – the sinister dark silhouette of a falcon shearing through the sky.  This was the swallow’s special ‘hobby alert’ call.  

Most of our common birds of prey – kestrel, sparrow hawk, buzzard, peregrine and red kite – are resident in Britain throughout the year, but we have one that is just a summer visitor, the hobby.  Why only in summer?  Well, that’s when its favourite prey is available, the swallows, martins and swifts, which it follows here each spring.  And it’s the only raptor with the specialist aerial skills to catch them.  Swifts and swallows are wonderful fliers themselves, of course, but they are no match for a hunting hobby, which is capable of breath-taking twists and turns at high speed to chase them down on the wing.  It’s such a deadly threat that the swallows have evolved this special call as an air-raid warning.  Hobbies also take dragonflies in large numbers, which they do with almost nonchalant ease, plucking them from the sky as they cruise along and then nearly stalling in mid-air to strip out the soft bodies and consume them in flight.  

Seen close-up, hobbies are very handsome birds with slate-coloured backs, white cheeks, black moustaches and rufous feathered ‘trousers’.  But they are quite easy to distinguish in flight, too.  Unlike a kestrel they never really hover, but scythe around, alternately soaring and diving on sharply angled wings, rather like huge swifts.  They are much smaller than, say, buzzards.  Indeed, their Latin name is Falco subbuteo and since a buzzard is a buteo this literally means ‘a falcon one size down from a buzzard’.  And herein lies an etymological curiosity.  Do you remember the table-football game called Subbuteo, which was very popular in the last century?  The inventor of that game, one Peter Adolph, wanted to call it ‘Hobby’, partly because it was a hobby in the other sense of ‘pastime’ and partly because the hobby was his favourite bird.  But when in 1948 he tried to register it as a trade-mark under that name, the Patents Office refused him for some reason, so he called it by its Latin name instead and they approved that.  A little natural history sometimes helps.

Jeremy Mynott
9 June 2025

Grass starts growing again at about 10°C (50°F) and you can track the movement of that isotherm across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, a green wave travelling north at about fifty kilometres a day, bringing with it a new season of light, warmth and growth – and a feeling of renewal.  Surfing that green wave are our migrant birds, and none bears a greater freight of these associations than the swallow and the swift, arriving here from southern Africa, respectively in mid-April and in early May.  I eagerly look out for them at their due dates every year, usually returning faithfully to exactly the same place at the same time. And I get a fizzing shot of adrenaline when I first see and hear them back again.  I’m not alone. These two species have been among our traditional spring and summer markers for centuries, welcomed back each year with relief, as the poet Ted Hughes put it, ‘that the globe’s still working’.  

Swallows and swifts were the favourite birds of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, who inspired a new tradition in nature writing in Britain.  White was an obscure country curate who lived all his life in the same house in the equally obscure village of Selborne in Hampshire (population about the same as Hollesley).  But his account of the daily changes to nature in his village through the seasons, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), became one of the most widely-read books in the English language, still in print today in multiple editions.  Its attraction was precisely its parochial focus, stressing the richness of the local, the particular and the familiar – or at least what you thought was familiar until you really looked at it.  He urged the importance of deepening one’s knowledge instead of just extending it: ‘Men that only undertake one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with.’ Not in favour of eco-tourism, then!

White was an amateur in its literal sense and he touched a chord with thousands of ordinary people.  He also attracted the admiration of such different figures as Charles Darwin, John Constable, William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, all of whom remark on the book’sapparently artless simplicity and charm.  White had effectively invented a new literary genre and so became the patron saint of today’s many nature diarists.  He also kept a daily journal and one of his most striking diary entries is an ecstatic two-word exclamation on 13 April 1768, greeting the first returning swallow to Selborne by its then scientific name:

‘Hirundo domestica !!!‘ (his exclamation marks). 

Jeremy Mynott
April 2025

If asked about their favourite bird songs most people might plump for the skylark, the nightingale, the blackbird or the song thrush.  But you could make a strong case for the curlew too.  The name is onomatopoeic, of course, referring to its call, a clear liquid curlee, delivered with a rising inflection on the second syllable like a cursive flourish in signing off its name.  The call is thrilling enough, especially when a whole flock of them takes off from the marshes in winter chorusing in unison, but the fulll song arouses an even higher level of emotional intensity.  It’s a long rippling trill, choreographed in a slow descending ‘air dance’ with the wings held open and raised above the head as if in exultation.  It’s a song that has moved poets to almost spiritual responses. Robert Burns wrote, ‘I never heard the solitary whistle of curlews on a summer noon without feeling an elevation of soul’; while

Ted Hughes rhapsodised, ‘Curlews in April hang their harps over the misty valleys…a wet footed god of the horizons.’  They even get a mention in one of our oldest poems, the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, ‘I take my gladness in the… sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men’.

It’s hard to hear this song in East Anglia now, though just a few pairs are still holding out in the Brecks.  You have to go to the main breeding grounds on the moors and rough pastures of northern England, Wales and Scotland, where the lonely landscapes render the song even more wild and wonderful. We still get large wintering populations of birds on our coastal marshes and estuaries, however, escaping colder temperatures in northern Europe.  They are the largest of our wading birds, the females larger than the males, and they are easily identifiable not only by their voices but by the obvious physical feature of that long decurved bill.  The full scientific name of the curlew is Numenius arquata and the first part of that, the generic name, means ‘shaped like the new moon’; while the second part, the specific name, just in case you hadn’t got the point, means ‘bent like a bow’.  So this is the ‘new moon’ bird, an image almost as lovely as the song.

Even in their strongholds in the uplands and bogs the number of breeding curlews in Britain and Ireland is declining fast, however – from changes in land use, drainage and reforestation schemes, and predation.  They have been put on the Red List of endangered species and there is an admirable charity advocating for their support (Curlew Action – check it out).

Jeremy Mynott
7 February 2015

I walked out on one of those dark, dank January days when the countryside seemed drained of colour and was eerily silent, as if muffled by the rising mist. That made all the more dramatic the deep throbbing bass note I suddenly heard as a large dark bird flew purposefully overhead with slow, elastic wing-beats. It called again, a hollow kronk kronk – and I realized I’d just encountered a raven. And now I could also see that in silhouette the bird had the distinctive diamond shaped tail of that species and a huge dagger bill.

Ravens are the largest members of the Corvid family, much bigger than rooks or crows, and even larger than the buzzards we regularly see around now.  Up to the nineteenth century ravens used to be common throughout Britain, but they were progressively hunted out in the south and east and until recently you could only see (or hear) them in the wilder parts of Wales and the West Country or in Upland Britain.  Indeed, they weren’t that easy to see anywhere, having become very shy and wary of humans – as well they might be.  But, like the buzzards, they are now making a comeback and are spreading eastwards again.  They’ve been breeding here in Suffolk since 2018 and seem to be re-establishing themselves.

Ravens are basically carrion-eaters – hence that meat-cleaver bill and their sinister associations with death and disaster.  Ravens were a familiar sight on battlefields and used to follow armies to feast on the corpses slain in battle, not just in the ancient world but up to at least the time of the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century.  From this it was an easy step to imagine them as prophets of doom, and maybe that’s why the collective noun for them is ‘an unkindness of ravens’.  Ravens could be good omens as well as bad, however.  We all know the legend that if the famous ravens long resident in the Tower of London should ever forsake it the kingdom would fall.  It turns out, though, that there is no real evidence that ravens were kept there until the 1880s, when the story first appeared in a children’s book. 

Myths can be manipulated as well as manufactured, of course.  During the Second World War all the Tower birds except one, who was rather sweetly called Pauline, were killed in the bombing raids and their aftermath. So, on Churchill’s instructions the keepers secretly brought in some new ones to keep up the national morale. A patriotic deception. 

Anyway, I’ll settle for my raven being a good omen and a welcome return of a native.

Jeremy Mynott
10 January 2025