Lead vocalist shuns spotlight
LOUD
The dowdy Cetti’s warbler makes up for its dingy plumage with a thunderous voice worthy of electrifying a grand opera house.
Nothing explodes with more gusto from a marshy thicket than the opening notes of this ace skulker’s invisible melodies. Think the vibrant opening of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik performed by a 100-piece orchestra.
Indeed, the great composer’s iconic serenade may well have been inspired by the warbler’s territorial song or, at least, a version mimicked by his beloved pet starling, Vogelstar.
Some believe the 15-gram Cetti’s warbler produces one the loudest weight-to-decibel sounds in nature, another of the characteristics of a species that is so easy to hear, but so hard to see in the wild.
To start, the warbler is the only British bird with 10 tail feathers, as opposed to the standard 12 of all our other nesting species, and it also lays the most astonishing neon red eggs.
Yet what really makes the Cetti’s warbler stand out among its avian peers is how it managed to spread north from Southern Europe to colonise the UK.
Birds New to Britain and Ireland, one of my favourite books, charts the discovery of the first ever individual to make it to these shores, arriving at Titchfield Haven, Hampshire, in March, 1961.
Obviously, it was heard before being seen but over subsequent days the good and the great of the birdwatching scene were lucky to get a glimpse. Few would have believed how the species would go on to spread so successfully over the next few decades.
A recent morning’s walk around one of my favourite wetland reserves in central Bedfordshire was punctuated incessantly with bursts of deafening Cetti’s warbler song but never any sign of the vocalists. I counted up to eight individual singers.
Since the first proven nesting in Kent in 1973, Cetti’s warblers have spread successfully around the English coast, along major southern river valleys and into the East Anglian fens. Latest counts show there are likely to be more than 3,400 males proclaiming territories this spring.
It only has 10 tail feathers and lays astonishing red eggs