Lee Connor
The Cirl Bunting is a rare avian success story, with numbers of the species on the up. It’s also the bird that ignited a love of birding for Lee Connor, as he explains...
will never forget his first encounter with a Cirl Bunting – the bird that ignited his passion for birdwatching!
Do you remember the moment when you first became absorbed by this incredible hobby of ours? The first little spark that set off that, quite often, all-consuming interest and lifelong fascination with watching wild birds? I do.
Now, I want to prefix this with the fact that I had always been interested in birds. Ever since I was a child, I have kept and bred pigeons, canaries and budgies. I had also always had something of a photographic memory and my father’s favourite ‘boast’ to visitors to the family home involved dragging out a bird guide, covering the bird’s name and asking me to identify it from its photograph or drawing. But I can pinpoint the very moment my interest in serious birdwatching was first piqued. It was the long hot dry summer of 1990, MC Hammer was topping the charts with U Can’t Touch This, Kevin Costner was Dancing With Wolves and the country had gone Ninja Turtle crazy!
I was aged 16 and we hadn’t long moved from the Enfield (North London) suburbs out to the village of Cuffley and the open countryside of Hertfordshire. Being so close to woods and fields was particularly liberating for me and I would spend hours wandering miles of footpaths with just my little red dachshund for company.
It was on one of these jaunts that I quite literally stumbled upon a large pond. The pond, shadowed by two enormous oak trees, was in the centre of closely sheep-cropped meadowland bordered by thick hedgerows and sat between the villages of Cuffley and Northaw. When I got home, I immediately told my younger brother (who was a keen amateur fisherman) about my discovery and bright and early the next morning we headed out (armed with a rod, tackle and a tin of worms) and made for the ‘secret’ pond. Within an hour, I was already bored… that is until I heard the sound of a small bird, a monotonous noise that wasn’t familiar to my ears.
I scanned the branches of the venerable Oak, whose cool dark shade I was most grateful for sitting in. And then, I suddenly spotted the maker of the unusual rattling sound. For a moment I thought it was nothing but a Yellowhammer – these were common enough in the countryside behind our bungalow – and I simply disregarded it, but its constant trilling made me look back up at it once more.
Although the little bird flitting around in the branches above me vaguely resembled a Yellowhammer, it quite clearly wasn’t one. Its bright yellow face wore a jet black eyestripe and it also had a black throat. It was soon joined by another, plainer bird, obviously a hen. I can still visualise them framed among the acid green leaves and brilliant blue sky of that warm summer day.
They cavorted through the branches for a
ALTHOUGH THE LITTLE BIRD IN THE BRANCHES ABOVE ME RESEMBLED A YELLOWHAMMER, IT QUITE CLEARLY WASN’T ONE
while and then the pair flitted off into the bright sunshine, across the meadow.
I sat for a while, quite confused and intrigued by what I had seen. What were they? I just had to know what those mysterious birds were. Later that day,
I made my way to the local library, with the image of those birds still burning bright in my mind (remember this was long before the internet), and scoured through the library’s collection of dusty bird guides.
There was only one real contender, that completely matched what I had seen, the Cirl Bunting. However, all the books agreed that this bird was confined to a small part of South Devon, and even there (at that time) it was extremely rare.
I never saw the birds again. Had I been mistaken? Or was there a small remnant population of Cirl Bunting in Hertfordshire (within sight of Canary Wharf) that had simply gone unnoticed? It certainly would be par for the course with this species. It is quite remarkable that this little bird was completely overlooked by British naturalists until 1800. The account of their ‘discovery’ is given in the Ornithological Dictionary and is quite fascinating. To think, at a time when voyages were returning to Britain (from far flung countries around the globe) loaded with all kinds of weird and wonderfully exotic plants and wildlife, there were still discoveries to be made much closer to home!
Colonel Montagu wrote: “We first discovered this species near Kingsbridge,
in the winter of 1800, (which was said to be a particularly severe winter in Devon) not uncommon among flocks of Yellowhammers and Chaffinches, and procured several specimens of both sexes, killed in different places six or seven miles from that place.
“They are indigenous to Devonshire, but seem confined to the southern parts of that county contiguous to the coast, having found them extending as far as Teignmouth, at both of which places we found their nests; but have never observed them far inland.
“It generally builds in furze, or some low bush; the nest is composed of dry stalks, roots and a little moss, and lined with long hair and fibrous roots. The eggs are four or five in number, cinereous white, with irregular long and short curved dusky lines, terminating frequently with a spot at one end; size rather inferior to those of the yellowhammer, to which it bears great resemblance.”
Montagu described the call of the Cirl Bunting as being, “monotonous… incessant, shrill and piercing.” And “so much resembling the call of the babillard [Lesser Whitethroat] that it requires considerable knowledge of their language not to mistake the one for the other.”
He then returns to the subject of the bird’s distribution.
“We are assured by Mr. Austin, that he shot a male of this species, in 1803, near Bridgewater, and in April, 1805, we observed a pair between Bridgewater and Glastonbury. Another specimen, in the collection of Col. George of Penryn, was shot near that place. According to continental authors, it is abundant in the warmer parts of France, in Italy, and on the shores of the Mediterranean; but it is not found in the colder regions.”
The species is also featured by Bewick, in his British Birds (1826 Edition) a wonderfully evocative engraving of a cock Cirl Bunting accompanies the short blurb: “Latham says that these birds are found only in the warmer parts of France and Italy, but Montagu made them out to be British birds. Our figure is from a wellpreserved specimen presented to the Newcastle Museum, by Mr. Henry Mewburn, of St German’s, Cornwall, where it was shot in 1822. This gentleman has besides ascertained that they breed in that neighbourhood, frequenting woods and high trees, and like the common Bunting, generally perching near the top.”
Fast forward 28 years, from that long hot 1990 summer, and I am now living very near to where Montagu made his new bunting ‘discovery’. Many things have changed for me, the MC Hammer CD and Ninja Turtle video have long been consigned to a charity shop, but I am still passionate about watching birds. A fine early summer morning will often find me on Berry Head, a favourite walk that often rewards with the sighting of a pair of Cirl Buntings, easily pinpointed by that distinctive and monotonous call! I never get tired of seeing them. And then, with the coming of the darker, harder days of winter, feeding at Broadsands Beach, offers even better chances of getting up close to them, often among the most unlikely (and suburban) of companions such as Blackbirds, sparrows and Robins.
The Cirl Bunting is one of those rare avian success stories, from a low of just 118 pairs in 1989 to the milestone of around 1,000 pairs in 2016, this surely must set the blueprint for conservation projects of the future. It shows what can be achieved through a partnership of farmers, landowners and even zoos (Paignton Zoo was heavily involved in the re-introduction of the species back into Cornwall) combined with likes of the RSPB, National Trust and Natural England.
Hopefully, this little stunner of a bird will now start to expand its range (before the population decline in the 1970s, the Cirl Bunting could be found across southern Britain, in some localities being as common as its close relative, the Yellowhammer) so who knows, its distinctive trill may one day even be heard back in Hertfordshire?
The Cirl Bunting is A rare Avian success story, from A low of just 118 pairs in 1989 To The milestone of 1,000 pairs in 2016