Nordic visitor is a master of disguise
No bird displays the mellow colours of winter quite like the brindle-toned brambling.
Burnished copper hues allow this Nordic finch to feed contentedly amid the decaying leaf litter found in woodland in December.
The great nature writer JA Baker described the brambling’s plumage as being “like sunset on silver scales of birch bark”.
The combination of orange, brown, black and white make for perfect camouflage to prevent predators from swooping on bramblings that are feasting on beechnuts on the forest floor.
Such disguise also means birdwatchers need patience to detect single birds among chaffinch flocks, with their autumnal shades of subdued pink, blue and brown.
Bramblings have to migrate south when their chilly forest haunts, stretching from Norway to the easternmost parts of Siberia, start to freeze.
And this winter is promising to be a good one for spotting them in your garden.
The British Trust for Ornithology has put birders on alert after thousands were counted recently passing across Belgium and the Netherlands on their way south.
If beechnuts are in short supply, bramblings will head for suburbia to take advantage of seeds put out to feed garden birds.
You might think the name brambling comes from the bird having a taste for blackberries – the fruit of the bramble – but it is more likely to have derived from ‘brandling’. This term is believed to be a corruption of brindle, a word used to describe the markings of tiger-striped dogs.
While wintering numbers of brambling vary greatly from year to year, hardly any choose to remain and breed in the UK.
The latest report from the Rare Breeding Birds Panel shows that in 2019 there was only one pair with eight chicks raised at a site in Clyde, Scotland.
That was the first successful nesting since 2002 and only the fourth since 1988. Sadly, it is a pattern that corresponds with the
49% decline of the species across Scandinavia the past four decades.
They have the perfect camouflage for feasting on the forest floor