Boxing Day Bird Watch

Our sitting room French window is large, and overlooks our small garden with a mulberry tree, and beyond it, over a low fence, an arable field fringed with trees, copses and overgrown hedgerows. We keep a record, virtually daily, of the birds we happen to see.

On Boxing Day I was free to watch as long as I wanted. As soon as I got up Avril told me that a goldcrest had appeared in a little shrub almost under the bedroom window. I had already, with a casual look out of the window, noticed the usual pheasants and blackbirds (often the first to catch the eye) and a jay - they have taken to visiting us lately: but to us a goldcrest is a rare visitor, though we have seen them occasionally in our neighbour’s garden. This seemed a promising start: perhaps, I thought, this might turn out to be one of our ‘twenty species’ days.

Within a short time we had notched up most of our regulars - chaffinches, greenfinches, blue tits and great tits and cole tits, dunnock and robin and wren, wood-pigeon, collared dove and starling . . . . But good scores mean spotting not only almost all the regulars, but quite a lot of the less regular too. So it was helpful to have a visit to our bird feeder from a pied (greater spotted) woodpecker and to see for the first time for several weeks the larger green woodpecker in a tall poplar just outside our garden.

We hardly ever used to see a house-sparrow in our territory until this year, but lately they have occasionally come to the seed or nut feeders. Today there were three. We quite often get long-tailed-tits, so a party of about seven of them was no great surprise, but very welcome. The marsh/willow tit (a useful description of a bird that must be either marsh tit or willow tit but almost impossible to distinguish without hearing them) that visited the seed dispenser hanging from the mulberry tree was a happy addition to the day’s list. A couple of goldfinches visited the dead stem, still bearing some seeds, of an evening primrose that had grown up at the edge of our lawn uninvited but welcome just the same: we have left it intact for the past few months and the goldfinches keep on coming to it. Much more unexpected was a male bullfinch, a species seen in our garden only two or three times since we arrived here three years ago.

This bullfinch had brought our score to twenty-two: we felt pretty sure that this might turn out to be a twenty-five-species day - it doesn’t happen often - so we looked out of the windows more frequently and expectantly. The twenty-third species was a starling - no rarity, of course, though we don’t see them in the garden every day. A black-headed gull flying over was the twenty-fourth and a very unexpected moorhen venturing on the grassy edge of the field from the spinney that adjoined our garden was the next.

Three mallard flew over the field - and a little later a drake mallard suddenly appeared walking out of the spinney, just as the moorhen had done. Most unusual. We were now approaching our record of twenty-seven species seen one day last summer. Mid-afternoon - what, if anything, might we expect to see at this stage ? A heron appeared flying from the north-west corner of the field, flapped in a leisurely manner and disappeared somewhere to the south of us - perhaps to investigate some pond. We don’t often see herons - perhaps three or four times a year, and never before in late December. This seemed almost too good to be true.

Just three to go to reach thirty, which we have never acheived before ! I thought I had better go and see if there was anything around in the front garden or the churchyard, which we can see from the front of our house. I was still on the doorstep when a jackdaw flew out of the small clump of birches in our front garden and vanished somewhere in the tall trees at the edge of the churchyard and the bowling green next door to it. I turned to go back to the house to add it to the list when Avril appeared at the door beckoning excitedly. We hurried into the living room, and she pointed and whispered ‘tree-creeper’ - and there it was, exploring the rugged bark of the mulberry tree. I think we have only seen a tree-creeper here once before. Only one more to make thirty ! Impatiently I went into the front garden again. Within a minute, there was a rush of wings and a flock of some thirty to forty fieldfares poured over the church and over my head and over the roof of our house. I rushed in hoping to see them from the big window at the back of the house, but by the time I got there they were just vanishing specks in the western sky.

Thirty ! I sat down to tidy up the list and counted again. Total twenty-nine. I had mis-counted. It was beginning to get a little darker now. It is my job to lock up the church each evening, so over the road I went, and into the churchyard. Almost too dark to identify anything now. But very occasionally in the three years we’ve lived here I have seen certain birds in or over the meadow behind the church. Not much hope - but worth a try. I stood looking over the hedge that bounds the far side of the churchyard, and scanned the view. What was that white thing ? It was moving, then disappeared and re-appeared from behind some overgrown hawthorns, and glided nearer and nearer. It was a barn owl . I have seen them there (say) two or three times in the dozens and dozens of times that I have walked to the bottom of the churchyard and looked over the fields and hedges beyond. And here was this bird in the Boxing Day gloaming, helping to break the record of species seen in a day from our little half-acre.

Mind you, I did have to go into the churchyard to spot that thirtieth, but I have always included it in our ‘patch’ because I go into it (and often walk round it) twice almost every day, and much of it is visible from our garden. If I seem to you to be cheating, don’t be so mean and literal. My conscience is clear: thirty species in one mid-winter day seen from our patch.

Boxing Day Bird Watch