Friday 11 May 2012

Chiffchaffs of Burton 2012


The purpose of the above was to try and establish how many Chiffchaffs inhabited our village within Burton In Kendal. And to make the job more pleasing, I decided to christen the birds by names relating to their geographical positions or other pleasing features. On normal years we have 34 breeding pairs, but sadly in 2014 this was severely reduced to 17 breeding pairs, caused by the stormy and frozen weather which came through March and more so towards the end of the month when these little birds were coming back to us. They hit many problems on their way, but also on arrival there just was no food for them.  In Lancelot you may have noticed I have called one of the birds "miss a note", (miss a note = she literally misses odd notes out of her repertoire eg: chiff chaff, chiff chaff chitty, chiff chiff chaff, etc) and from this I take it that I am hearing and seeing the same bird each year (one of the recognizable!) and not yet on this sketch but we do have another recognizable bird which is again in Lancelot but just higher up that "miss a note" and this one is called "Speedy" because he/she does her call at double the speed to the norm and its that fast its just about decipherable.