BIRD 6

We finish with what appears to be a small bird singing from the top of a ‘weed’. It is another streaked brown bird. The bill looks slender and quite long, like a warbler or perhaps a pipit. But the wing shape (showing lots of primaries rather than lots of covering tertials) and rounded/pointed tail don’t look like pipit features. This is a warbler, and as we have pointed out before, there are only a few which have streaks. One is the Sedge Warbler, which is well-known for having a very obvious, broad, pale supercilium, which we can’t see here. The Fan-tailed Warbler, or Zitting Cisticola, is a tiny warbler with unmarked underparts. This bird has an ochre infusion on the underparts and a few streaks on the undertail coverts, making it a Grasshopper Warbler.

KEY FEATURES †Slim, warbler-like build †Streaked upperparts †Short, indistinct supericilium †Pointed tail