Things to look out for in the garden - identifying garden birds by call or appearance

If only they'd sit still where you can see them, birds would be easy to identify, wouldn't they? But they do insist on hiding in trees and flying around, the little rascals! Here are some pointers:

1. Blackbirds: the male is all black with a yellow bill and yellow eye ring but the female is dowdy, brownish, with a brown tip to her bill, which can be yellow at the base, and often she has lighter feathering on the breast. More confusing still is the fact that last year's young, which are like the female but spottier, slowly change through their second winter into adult plumage. Blackbirds have a very loud alarm call, warning every other bird in the vicinity and from March produce a beautiful song at dawn and dusk.
2. Wrens are identical in both sexes - a really tiny bird which creeps around the garden at ground level, rather like a mouse, is a soft brown all over except for a pale eye-stripe, and holds its tail cocked up. It only eats insects, which means any bird seen on your bird table is not a wren! It has a marvellous trilling song, which is astonishingly loud from such a small bird, often heard in fine, warm winter weather.
3. Robins, again the male and female adults are identical, but the spotty brown juveniles don't develop the red breast until the autumn of their second year. You will normally only ever seen one bird at a time. The autumn song is rather wistful but from December on the male sings more loudly, proclaiming its breeding territory.
4. Blue tits are tiny with a bright blue cap, a black eye-stripe, white cheeks and a stubby bill. Males and females are almost identical although the male is slightly brighter in colour. It has a variety of short calls, and a mini song. It is smaller than the great tit, but can be confused with the coal tit which is almost the same size, but has a black cap with a V shaped white mark up the back of the neck.
5. The collared dove first arrived in the UK in 1961, and has steadily increased its numbers ever since. It is a sandy grey-brown, much smaller than a woodpigeon, and has a black mark on either side of its neck, when it flies it often shows white outer tail feathers and makes a racket in the air. They are usually present in twos or threes and give a monotonous three-note call; Cuc-coo-coo
6. The house sparrow was once found in every garden but vanished from about a quarter of them in the eighties. It is a noisy, cheeky, highly sociable bird, always in small groups. The endless chirping calls can be irritating, especially if they start in the false dawn at 4am! The male has a prominent black bib, which the female lacks being entirely brown.

Garden collared dove photograph by Eggy Bird, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

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