FLYING AROUND THE FARLEIGHS WITH RAY MORRIS
THE GARDEN MONEY CHANGER
It’s officially Spring, so we expect our days in the garden and countryside to ring with birdsong. While a very few species, like robins for example, sing throughout the year, other species start to join them their numbers amplified by the returning migrants, here to make the most of our long days and (once) plentiful insects.
One of the first to return is a diminutive, but persistent singer, the chiffchaff. Its repetitive song is easily distinguished from the increasingly crowded dawn chorus, and most days it can be heard all the time except around noon when most birds take a break to preen out of sight in foliage.
So called because of its onomatopoeic song – chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff – its call is also reflected in its Dutch Tjiftjaf, German Zilpzalp and Basque Chifftxaff names.
It will also be busily hunting insects to put on weight ready for the energy-hungry task of breeding – two broods of five or six eggs each year. Often picked from the underside of leaves, this behaviour leads to its scientific name Phylloscopus – Greek for leaf-seeker. Its insect prey is hungry too, for the same reproductive reason, and can often be found feeding on nectar in the emerging flowers. Birds too are partial to the sweet liquid, and small bills and tongues probing flowers for nectar and insects all add to the process of fertilisation of plants by transferring pollen from to another. Scientists are only just becoming aware of the role birds play in this, and their commercial value as pollinators of fruit. It is now thought blue tits’ spread around the northern hemisphere mirrors the spread of apple trees, as both were linked by pollination.
Evidence to support this theory is often seen if you are lucky enough to get a close look at small birds in spring. As chiffchaffs, for example, fly northwards from Mediterranean north Africa, they fuel their journey with nectar from the emerging spring flowers along the route and continue their sugary feeding once here. But as we all know from our sticky fingers after eating a doughnut, sugary, syrupy food leaves its mark on everything that touches it, so small birds poking around in flowers get nectar and pollen stuck on their facial feathers and emerge with what ornithologist’s call ‘pollen horns’.
The second part of the Chiffchaff’s scientific name – collybita – is also taken from the Greek for ‘money changer’. An oblique reference to the tinkling sound of small coins changing hands. As is often the case, the common countryfolk got there before scientists did: in Normandy this delightful herald of spring was once known as ‘Compteur d’argent’.