Bird of the Month: Willow Warbler John Mcewen
Viscount Grey, birdwatcher and Foreign Secretary (1905-16), wrote, ‘It is song that is the most pleasing feature of bird life, but it is the last to arouse in most people any keen or intelligent attention’ ( The Charm of Birds).
It is easy enough to identify the calls of big birds, but the songs of often invisible songbirds are a different matter. Where better to start than with the willow warbler ( Phylloscopus trochilus)?
Henry Douglas-home, who could identify the sound of every bird in a dawn chorus, was an ardent admirer: ‘Willow warblers sing the same phrase almost every half-minute of daylight from April to June. Some may call it a ditty, but for me the twenty seconds of its lovely cadence is finer than all the stronger voices it contends with’ ( The Birdman).
W H Hudson, another admirer ( British Birds), quoted the historian and ornithologist William Warde Fowler: ‘Beginning with a high and tolerably full note, he drops it both in force and pitch in a cadence short and sweet, as though he were getting exhausted with the effort. This cadence is often perfect: by which I mean that it descends gradually, not, of course, on the notes of our musical scale but through fractions of one, or perhaps two, of our tones, and without returning upward at the end.’
Hudson also quoted the naturalist and essayist John Burroughs, who wrote (quoting from Shakespeare – Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 1) that the song ‘touches the heart… The song of the willow-warbler has a dying fall; no other bird is so touching in this respect.’
Lord Grey called its song ‘soft as summer rain’.
The willow warbler and its fellow Phylloscopus (leaf explorer) the chiffchaff are two of the leaf-warbler family – so called because of colour and habitat. Both were once described as willow wrens, to which the willow warbler can add – because of its haunts, appearance and usually grounded nest – a variety of names including Sally (willow) Picker (Ireland), Tom Thumb (Roxburghshire), Willie Muftie (Scotland), Fell Peggy (Lancashire), Nettle Bird (Herefordshire), Grass Mumruffin (Worcestershire) and Ground Oven (Norfolk) – see Francesca Greenoak’s British Birds: Their Folklore, Names and Literature.
Until the turn of the century, one could readily hear its song in south-east England, not least in London. Chiffchaffs, chiefly distinguishable from willow warblers by their song, remain, but the willow warblers have gone.
The last I heard was in copse-lined Caledonian Park, north London – formerly Caledonian Market, originally for livestock, later diversified. In the 1980s, there were still local residents who remembered cattle barging into shops.
Despite having declined in England, and especially the south-east, by 70 per cent in the last 25 years, willow warblers remain Britain’s most abundant and widespread warbler (2,300,000).
England’s loss is the more rural West Country, Wales, Scotland and Ireland’s gain. The same goes for such similarly declining summer migrants from sub-saharan Africa – house martins and cuckoos.