Is it a bird? Oh, yes, it’s a…

Posted on 11 Jan 2010 | 1 comment

We do love to feed the birds in the garden, and have been going the extra mile the last month or two with all this freezing weather and snow. We have two practically-tame pied wagtails who get quite irate of the mealworms aren’t out fast enough in the mornings, and the boys are often to be found sitting very still watching the feeders through the french doors, muttering ‘blue tit, great tit, long-tailed tit, blue tit, sparrow, blue tit, robin, blackbird, blue tit, blackbird…’

So when at the weekend we had a rogue visitor in the garden there was much consternation.

“whats that one Mummy? But what is it? It’s a bit like a blackbird. But its speckly. It’s a bit like  thrush. But it’s not.”

In true and proper contemporary parenting style, I did the only thing a responsible parent could do. Headed for Mr Google. Nightmare. How do you find a bird, when you don’t know what it is to start with? To make matters worse, the bird was VERY uncooperative, and flew off every time it got a sniff someone was looking at it, so we had to employ stealth tactics. And Daddy’s posh binoculars.

Then I tried the RSPB website. Bingo! Right on the home page, there it was - ‘Bird identifier’. That sounded the ticket! A few clicks later, and we had it – just like that! We had a… (are you excited?)… Fieldfare! Not terribly rare or exciting, but new to us – and oh so satisfying to know what it is!

So thank you RSPB, for providing a handy little tool which was so ace at doing its job. And lovely to see the Fieldfare has become a frequent visitor. But still doesn’t like us much.

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