It is, after all, the most bird-heavy festive ditty imaginable, with not only the obvious partridges, doves, hens, swans and geese, but oblique references to blackbirds (four calling birds) and depending on source either goldfinches or pheasants (five gold rings).
Not a bird of garden feeding stations, unless your house backs on to a farm, but one that, when you see or hear one, tells you that you’ve arrived in rural Britain.
The sleek, beautiful waxwing is not usually a British resident, but breeds in northern coniferous forests around the globe, from Scandinavia to Asia to North America.
It’s an unremarkable, streaky little finch, not unlike linnets or redpolls but without either species’ bright red head markings.
They bob up and down almost constantly whilst feeding atop dull yellow legs – a nervous bundle of readiness – before flying off low over the water on stiffly held wings
When I first started my own birding adventures, ravens were still not easy to find, and only partially through inexperience (ID tips in a nutshell: look for a buzzard-sized, flying black cross with a wedge-shaped tail and a guttural croak for a call).
The British population is small, and rather ephemeral. Quail being our only migrant gamebird, numbers fluctuate hugely from year to year and depend strongly on conditions further south.
I don’t know what unusual super power ‘meadow’ would suggest, but collectively pipits do seem to possess the power of invisibility: the phrase ‘little brown job’ may well have been invented to describe pipits.
Chris Foster gives us his latest in the A to Z of British Birds series. This week… Owls.
The jarring from which they take their name, more commonly referred to as churring – an eerie, mechanical sort of noise that’s straight out of a science fiction film, and possibly the strangest noise I’ve ever heard coming from a bird.