Your Birding Month

Birds to find this month include Marsh Harrier, Greenfinch and Little Gull

Nuthatches are great little birds, full of character and spirit, as well being subtly very pretty in their own right. The character comes from their unique (in a British context) shape and way of moving. They look like a mix between a woodpecker and a tit: with a woodpecker’s chisel bill, powerful head end and strong gripping legs, but with the agility and soft colours of a tit. They also lack a woodpecker’s stiff tail feathers (unlike Treecreepers, which go in for this extra prop when climbing along trunk and branch alike). They are most famous, though, for happily descending trees, head first, which none of our other species regularly do. This ability is due in no small part to their huge feet (with a conventional three toes forward, one back; again unlike a woodpecker’s two forward, two back arrangement). They use this upside down skill to good effect when living up to their name, and repeatedly hammering a nut, which the bird has wedged into a bark crevice in a tree trunk. Indeed, if this month you hear repeated hard tapping in a wood, it will either be a woodpecker or one of these beauties (or a Great Tit trying the same trick, the right way up!). Like the tits and the woodpeckers, Nuthatches nest in holes in trees, often those made by woodpeckers. In order to keep aggressive birds, such as Great Spotted Woodpeckers out, they usually pack mud around the entrance hole to narrow it.