has taken advantage of our generosity by learning to come to seed and peanut feeders and bird tables. Here, it dominates the smaller birds, which will usually flee as it approaches. Nesting blue and great tits have good reason to fear this pied predator, as they will raid nest boxes to seize their chicks.
Britain used to have another woodpecker species – the wryneck – but this has become extinct as a breeding bird and now breeds only in continental Europe. Of the ten woodpecker species that occur in Europe, just four managed to cross the Channel and recolonise Britain since they were driven out by the last Ice Age. Amazingly, Europe’s largest species, the black woodpecker, is found as close to the UK as Calais but has never made the short flight over to our shores.
©ImageBroker/Imagebroker/FLPA
The scarce and elusive lesser spotted woodpecker is one of our most rapidly declining woodland birds.
©Paul Sawer/FLPA
Treecreepers sing their high-pitched, delicate song from early spring onwards.
These two characteristic birds of woods and forests are easy to overlook, yet fascinating in their habits. Apart from the woodpeckers, no other pair of birds has adapted so well to their tree-loving lifestyle.
Finding either of them can take time and patience, but it is certainly better to sit and wait, rather than walk around, as you are searching for movement, which is always much easier to notice if you are still. Listening is also helpful. Both species have distinct calls: the nuthatch has a rather loud and penetrating ‘too-it’, while the treecreeper utters a very high-pitched call, which can be confused with that of another small woodland bird, the goldcrest.
If you get a good view of a nuthatch, you simply cannot mistake it for any other bird. It is about the size of a great tit, but plumper and more potbellied in shape, with gunmetal-blue upper parts and orange under parts, a long, dagger-like bill and a really distinctive black ‘highwayman’s mask’. It also has the unique skill among British birds of being able to climb down a tree trunk as well as up, which is very useful when you live in a world of vertical trunks and horizontal branches.
The treecreeper is a smaller bird, much more modest in its appearance and habits. Basically, it is brown above and white below, but you are much more likely to identify it by its habits than by its plumage. It behaves rather like a small rodent, climbing up and around the trunks of trees before flying off to the next one, thus revealing that it is a bird and not a small mammal. If you get good views, you will see its thin, decurved bill – perfect for prising tiny insects out of the crevices of the bark in which they may be hiding.
Treecreepers are found throughout Britain and Ireland, whereas the nuthatch is confined mainly to England and Wales, though a few have now spread northwards to breed in southern Scotland. With climate change, nuthatches may continue to extend their range northwards in the coming decades, but they are a very sedentary bird, unable to cross large stretches of water, which explains why they are not found in Ireland.
Like most other woodland birds, the nuthatch and the treecreeper nest in holes or crevices in trees, but whereas the nuthatch usually chooses an old woodpecker hole, which it often makes smaller by patching it up with mud, the treecreeper prefers to nest in a narrow crack or even beneath a piece of loose bark. Both will readily take to nest boxes, the nuthatch in the usual ‘tit box’, and the treecreeper in a specially designed, wedge-shaped version, rather like a bat box in shape.
In the autumn and winter months, they will often join forces with other small birds, such as flocks of tits and goldcrests; tagging along with these birds is the best way to find scarce resources of food. Nuthatches, as befits their more confident character, will also come to bird feeders, often scaring off other birds as they do so.
In winter, treecreepers can be very vulnerable. They suffer especially badly during ‘glazed frosts’, where a freeze occurs after a spell of rain, as the frost covers up their food supply beneath the bark of trees. Numbers often drop heavily following such weather, though within two or three years the population usually bounces back.
©Paul Hobson/FLPA
With its colourful plumage and striking black mask, the nuthatch is one of the easiest woodland birds to identify.
©Mike Lane/FLPA
©Jurgen & Christine Sohns/FLPA
The house sparrow and the dunnock are often ignored in favour of more colourful garden birds, but show some fascinating behaviour.
Three birds in Britain share the name ‘sparrow’, two of which are true sparrows: the house and the tree sparrows. The third, the so-called ‘hedge sparrow’, is now more properly known as the dunnock. A member of the accentor family, it is completely unrelated to the seed-eating sparrows. Despite the name change, however, many people still refer to this charming little bird as a hedge sparrow.
Of all the birds that are seen in our gardens, towns and cities, surely the most familiar is the house sparrow. Sparrows have almost certainly lived alongside human beings longer than any other species of wild bird. They have done so from early times for one simple reason: our ancestors grew grain, which the sparrows could steal for food. We soon got our own back: communal nests of house sparrows, in the walls and roofs of our homes, were regularly raided for eggs to supplement a meagre diet.
As they have lived alongside us for so long, we have tended to take house sparrows more or less for granted. Their appearance doesn’t do them any favours. They are the classic ‘little brown job’, though the male, at least, can claim to be a little more handsome than his mate, with his grey and brown cap and smart black bib. Female and juvenile house sparrows really are the archetypal small brown bird, with few distinctive markings, apart from a pale stripe running behind the eye.
In recent years, many of us have taken to giving sparrows a helping hand by putting up communal nest boxes. The house sparrow is a sociable bird, which prefers to nest in colonies, so a box with several entrance holes and chambers is likely to encourage them. And they need this help. In the past few decades, the sparrow has declined faster and more seriously than almost any other garden bird. This is despite the fact that we now feed wild birds much more than previous generations, which should help one so tied to human habitation as the house sparrow.
The reasons for its rapid decline are complex. It is almost certainly down to a combination of factors, each of which may affect different populations of sparrows, and other birds, at different stages of their lives. We know that changes in farming practices – especially the sowing of winter wheat in autumn, which removes the amount of seed left on the land in winter – have affected sparrows as well as finches and buntings, their close relatives.
The ‘yuppification’ of our towns and cities, with loft conversions and the general tidying-up of homes, has undoubtedly reduced the number of places available for sparrows to nest under the eaves of houses. But the biggest problem may be an unseen one. It is thought
