Your Birding Month
What makes Corn Bunting our Bird of the Month? Plus, five great birds to look for this month
In some ways the Corn Bunting is the ultimate LBJ (little brown job), being streaky, brown and nondescript in the extreme (except for being one big, chunky bunting!). But they are great birds, and have suffered massive declines across most of the country, like so many of our smaller birds, falling victim to modern farming practices (they’re now on the Red List of declining birds).
It is not just their large size, relative scarcity and charming leg dangling flight which makes them attractive. It is also their famous, stuttering, insanely rapid, ‘ jangling keys’ song, which is so evocative of how bird-rich open country ‘should’ sound (and still does over less intensively farmed areas of Europe).
Corn Buntings even sing in the mid-winter, given a nice singing day. But it is in the spring, when they are setting up and defending territories, that their crazy song sounds at its best. If you are lucky enough to have Corn Buntings close to home, enjoy them this spring, when they are at their dowdy, dumpy best.